Marita Canina

/ Mentor

Ph.D. in Industrial Design. She is Associate Professor at the Department and the School of Design at Politecnico di Milano, where she is also Scientific Director of both the IDEActivity Center and the BioDesign Laboratory. The IDEActivity Center is a Center for Excellence in Creativity and Design, whose aim is to give value to all aspects of creativity, promoting innovation through design, as well as to activate and re-enforce all phases of the “creative process” within any given context. The Biodesign Lab, absorbed in 2017 by IDEActivity, deals with R&D activities on bio-medical fields, providing solutions through a Human-Centred Design approach. Her current research interests are oriented towards developing activities that combine research in design, studies on creativity, and a people-centred approach for creating tools and methods able to enhance the creative design process applied in particular to the biodesign field. In 2006 she was PostDoc Associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she contributed to a wearable technology research program for an EVA spacesuit (Bio-suit) working on the Line of Non-Extension theory developed by Iberall. She has collaborated with CEFRIEL (ICT Center of Excellence for Research, Innovation, Education & Industrial Labs) on innovation through design, managing projects and research programs while focusing on User Experience. Said activities were mainly conducted for SMEs. In particular, she designed and run brainstorming sessions and co-design workshops and set up the “Usability and Interaction Design Lab”. From 1966 till 2005 she was Temporary Research Associate at the Robotics Lab. of the Politecnico di Milano, where she carried out R&D functions as biodesigner for experimental projects. She worked, mainly, in Bio-Robotics System Design, whose fundamental criteria have been miniaturization, ergonomics and creating user-friendly interfaces. She has worked on Design Integration as well as Safety in Robotics and Sensorial and Effective Robotics, with particular interest in experimental applications of MEMS. Among the main projects: an electronically controlled lower limb prosthesis and an experimental bio-engineering system for detection and comparison of motion parameters in patients affected with Parkinson’s Disease. She has taken part in several researches, both national and European, collaborating with International Research Centres to propose researches oriented to enhance design and creativity for innovation in SMEs support. She's author of a number of foundational books on Biodesign, and of several international publications, some of which have been mentioned and awarded (i.e. Best Paper ICINCO 2005, included in Springer publication). As an inventor, she holds EU patents and models originated from contracted research assignments.