Team

PhD and Assistant professor of the Design Department of the Politecnico di Milano. Specialized in managing strategic design projects and in particular international projects for small and medium industries, Design Methods and Design Thinking processes.

Interior and Spatial Designer, she is now a fellow researcher and teaching assistant at the Design School of the Politecnico di Milano. MSc in Interior Design (2018) at the Politecnico di Milano (Italy) with a thesis entitled “Oltre il Vuoto / A system of widespread exhibitions in disused cinema in Milan” staging the declinations and interpretations of the theme. Today, her main research project concerns the design of spaces and services for educational environments at different levels such as primary and secondary schools through a process of co-designing with the local community. The research activity deals with the project “La Mia Scuola è Differente!”, selected by the social enterprise Con i Bambini within the fund for the fight against child educational poverty.

Stefana is the cofounder of Cleanweb an organisation that uses the web to address climate change, which operates IYWTO the most extensive existing platform of green digital services. Between 2014 and 2016 she was Head of Collective Intelligence at Nesta in London. Stefana has been a convener of the MSc. in Digital Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at University College London, she is an Honorary Fellow of the Centre for Digital Anthropology at UCL in London and visiting Professor in the School of Design Politecnico di Milano. She was in the strategy board of Swisscom where she led the Observatory of Digital Life until 2008. Stefana has a degree in Psychology from the University of Geneva and a PhD in Cognitive Science from the University of Edinburgh. Her recent publications include chapters in the The Onlife Manifesto (2015) and Digital Anthropology (2012) and her book Intimacy at Work (Routledge 2016).

PhD in Design, Research Fellow at the Design Department and Adjunct Professor at the School of Design of Politecnico di Milano and at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano. Her research is focused on the relationship between spatial design and service design, especially addressing the fundamentals of the disciplines, and on advanced training models for PhD in Design education. She has been involved in the “Human Cities, Challenging the city scale” research project (Creative Europe Programme) and she is exploring the relationship between design for social Innovation and aesthetics and storytelling through different exploratory projects. She is involved in the DESIS Philosophy Talk series on The Politics of Nature, questioning what the ontological shift to a non-anthropocentric mind-set may possibly mean for design for social innovation.

Associate professor at Politecnico di Milano and adjunct professor at the Universidad de Navarra (Pamplona, Spain). Coordinator of the POLIMI DESIS Lab, member of the international committee at DESIS Network. Coordinator of the “Off Campus Nolo”, the living lab in the Nolo Neighbourhood.  He published “Temporary Urban Solutions” (2012), “In the neighbourhood” (2017) and “Univeristies as drivers for social innovation”. His research is about the relationship between space and service with a community centred approach. Awarded with XXV Compasso d’Oro in 2018 for the research project “campUS – incubation and settings for social practices”, ambassador for the Italian Design Day (2018-2019).

Architect, she has been working since 2011 within the Department of Design – Politecnico di Milano developing applied research and training programmes on social innovation and collaborative services. She is expert in conceiving and managing co-design processes for groups and communities, with a specific focus on the housing sector. She has been involved in several projects, national and international, such as: La Scuola dei Quartieri, Socialhousenet, SAME – Supporting Action for Migrants Entrepreneurship

PhD in Design, Fellow Researcher at the Design Department and Contract Professor at the School of Design of Politecnico di Milano. In recent years she designed the interiors and services for the Expo Village for Expo Milan 2015, and she was the project manager of the last Cumulus Conference in Milan (June 2015). Now she is working at “campUS”, a Polisocial research project, and “Human Cities“, a European research project.

Jiang Jixiang, PhD candidate. His research focus on the relationship between human and non-human nature agency in collaborative cities under the guidance of design-driven social innovation. Those small and medium-sized cities both in Italy and China with different social culture backgrounds and in different developing level are diversity and attractive，especially in recent years in the process of urbanization in China, the countryside around many large cities is gradually becoming a part of the city. How the evolution of human and non-human nature agency relations affects the evolution of collaborative cities in the dimension of space and service design is the author’s interest point.

For more than two decades he has been working on design for sustainability and social innovation. Therefore he started DESIS, International Network on Design for Social Innovation . He has explored design potentialities in different fields, such as: Design of Materials, in the 80s; Strategic Design, in the 90s; Service Design, in the last ten years.
Presently, he is Honorary Professor at the Politecnico di Milano and Guest Professor at Tongji University (Shanghai). His most recent book is “Design, When Everybody Designs. An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation”, MIT Press 2015.

Martina Mazzarello is a Spatial designer and Ph.D. Candidate at Politecnico di Milano (Italy) and Visiting Researcher at the MIT Senseable City Lab (Boston, USA). She has a Master’s degree in Spatial Design (2015) at the Politecnico di Milano (Italy) after an exchange program at Tongji University in Shanghai (China). She has been working in the Design Department of Politecnico di Milano within Polimi DESIS lab since 2016, as Fellow researcher, focusing on urban public spaces and services as dynamic systems of human actions and interactions.

Architect and PhD in Design, I’m Full Professor of Design in the Department of Design at the Politecnico di Milano. My research focus is on service and strategic design for sustainability to foster social innovation, participation and local development. A specific expertise has been developed in co-design methods and tools. I have originated the concept of community-centred design and I work transversally on new entrepreneurship, public services and responsible research and innovation. Since 2016 I’m the head of the international Master of Science in Product Service System Design, at the School of Design of Politecnico di Milano. From 2013 to 2019 I have been the coordinator of the POLIMI-DESIS Lab and I have served as international coordinator of DESIS from 2013 to 2016. I’m on the board of the PhD program in Design, principal investigator of national and international research projects, chair of conferences, author of several publications, member of different scientific boards and visiting lecturer in international universities.

PhD Candidate at the Design Department of the Politecnico di Milano. Her research regards the topic of “Civic Design”. She is part of the PoliMI DESIS Lab. She’s a Teaching Assistant in both the Bachelor and Master’s Degree Programs in Product Service System Design and Interior Design at PoliMI’s School of Design. She has been a Research Fellow in the same Department. During her fellowship she collaborated on various projects with the IIT Institute of Design in Chicago, the Chamber of Commerce in Milan, POLI.design, the municipalities of Puebla and Mérida in Mexico, Cumulus International Association, Triennale di Milano, GIDE (Group for International Design Education), and CampUS, a Polisocial research project. She holds a M.Sc. in Product Design for Innovation, obtained at PoliMI.

Phd and Adjunct Professor, she is a Service Designer that focuses her research and activity on Co-Design processes, Participatory Design, Design Thinking and Scenario Building. Besides being involved in different European projects such as “CIMULACT“, she is developing her doctoral research on the impact of Design Thinking within the private and the public sector.
She is active in engaging the Service Design community in a discussion about the discipline therefore she co-organizes the Service Design Drinks Milan.

PhD in Design, Daniela is Associate Professor at the Design Department of Politecnico di Milano. She has been one of the first researchers investigating the area of Service Design. She worked for eight years at the research group Imagination at Lancaster University till 2015. Her research theme is the role of design in the development of services, with a particular focus on public sector innovation. Recently she is conducting research on the role of design for co-production in mental healthcare. She is the co-author of Design for Services (Gower) and Designing for Service. Key Issues and New Directions (Bloomsbury) books. 

Service Designer, PhD, Research Fellow and Adjunct Professor at the School of Design of Politecnico di Milano. Her research interests cover service design and social innovation, focusing on citizen activism, methods and tools for co-design, public services and policies, design for local development. Among her projects there is “Creative Citizens”, an intensive experimentation devoted to co-design and co-produce services with a group of citizens in a neighbourhood of Milan. She also acts in an advisory capacity for start-up incubation programmes and organisations from private and third sector, deepening the intersection between service design, sharing economy and the notion of collaboration.

Virginia Tassinari is Marie Curie seal of excellence post-doc researcher at Politecnico di Milano (IT), where she is also visiting professor. Furthermore, she is adjunct professor at LUCA School of Arts (BE), where she also founded the LUCA DESIS Lab and collaborates with Pantopicon (BE), an Antwerp-based foresight and design studio. Her research areas are design and philosophy, with a specific focus on design for social innovation, participatory design and design activism. Virginia has been a board member of Cumulus Association and is currently a member of the International Coordination Committee of DESIS Network (Design for Social Innovation & Sustainability), an international network within which she is also, together with Ezio Manzini, co-initiator and coordinator of the DESIS Philosophy Talks, a series of discussions on design research & philosophy.

PhD Candidate in Service Design at Politecnico di Milano, has been a Research Fellow for DigiMooD for CCIs European project.
During his university career, he took part in several academic programs: MEDes – which brought him one year at Köln International School of Design and one at Universidade de Aveiro – Alta Scuola Politecnica – a double degree between Politecnico di Milano and Politecnico di Torino which leads him to develop an interdisciplinary attitude to innovation – and SUGAR – a one year Design Thinking programme to innovate a company, in partnership with Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia and Technische Universität München.
His research topic is Service Design Education Landscape, aimed at investigating the emerging phenomenon of training in Service Design and exploring how new educational models affect design education.

Interior and Spatial Designer and PhD candidate in Design at the Politecnico di Milano. His research is focused on the relationship between human beings and non-human agents in common urban spaces. He collaborated in research activities dealing with space and service design projects related to the reactivation of local communities in urban contexts. He currently works at the Department of Design, participating in research projects with the POLIMI DESIS Lab and the School of Design of the Politecnico di Milano where he attends didactic activities as Tutor within the Bachelor and Master Degree courses.

Diana Pamela holds a MSc. in Product Service System Design from Politecnico di Milano and is currently a PhD candidate in Design. In particular, she is investigating the practice of Design in Policy, focusing on design methods in policymaking. Along her academic career and more than five years of job experience, Pamela has worked in Italy, Germany, The Netherlands and Colombia. Driven by social innovation, she has worked with youth and children, as well as refugees and other marginalized communities. Furthermore, she has led multidisciplinary teams and worked for European projects, the manufacturing industry, design consultancy and education.