ekip´s profile of the month: Valentina Auricchio

Dr Valentina Auricchio is researcher and project manager. Her research is focused on Design Methods and managing strategic design projects with small and medium industries including Design Thinking processes. Her interest is in design processes, methods and tools and their application within different sectors for strategic innovation. She is part of the Polimi DESIS Lab and of the international DESIS Network (Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability). Ms Auricchio has various working experiences from the Director of IED Research Centre (from 2009 to 2011) to Co-editor of Ottagono international magazine in Design and Architecture (from 2012 to 2014) and co-founder of the consulting firm 6ZERO5 in 2016. She teaches at Politecnico di Milano in the Master Course in Product Service System Design and in the Product Design Bachelor degree focusing mainly on user studies, strategic design and design methods.

The Department of Design of the Politecnico di Milano brings specific expertise in design thinking, co-design, design for services, design for social innovation and design for policy, through the POLIMI DESIS Lab, the team belonging to the international network ‘Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability’.

POLIMI DESIS Lab is a research unit that works adopting a strategic and systemic approach to design, with a specific focus on design for services, participatory design and design activism. It has a background in service and product-service-system design for sustainability and investigates the way design can support and trigger social innovation, combining creativity and visioning with the capability of engaging in co-design processes.

The Lab has a distinctive experience of collaboration with public administrations, third sector organisations and also companies. The Lab has been working on social innovation since 2004: the team formulated the concept of community-centred design as a way to work with local ecosystems, in order to enable people, communities, enterprises and social actors to activate and manage innovation processes, aimed at experimenting with sustainable and collaborative ways of living.

Among the recent projects developed by the lab, a four-year research project, named “Human Cities/SMOTIES, Creative works with small and remote places” (SMOTIES), was co-funded by the European Education and Culture Executive Agency of the European Commission within the Creative Europe Programme to foster creative thinking and innovation in European small and remote places.

See paper – “Scenario-building for creative future solutions in remote places”
https://ecp.ep.liu.se/index.php/servdes/article/view/800/705