A new adventure: Marie Curie Fellowship at the University of Cambridge

The world is ageing (https://bit.ly/1NrvBlE) and the demographic change of the population has consequences for different aspects of daily life (https://bit.ly/2NcjHC7). The United Nations, with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) (https://bit.ly/2d4dcA4), stated how health & well-being, sustainable cities & communities, and innovation & infrastructure represent the baseline for guaranteeing a better future for the population. These goals serve as guiding principles for researchers and for the industry to improve solutions that profoundly affect our lives.

Despite several technologies, we use every day, and a variety of environments we live in are named as “innovative solutions”, most of them still constitute barriers that make us feel disabled in different ways. There is a strong need for enabling and equitable solutions that augment everyone’s capabilities.

Since the start of my PhD in Industrial Design (with a focus on UX - User Experience and IoT - Internet of Things), I developed cutting-edge foundational research to understand the challenges, as well the gaps that prevent people, with a variety of capabilities, to be fully recognized and included in the society. The emphasis of my research started from how inclusive design can foster the use of IoT technologies to shape accessible, engaging, and inclusive products and environments.

With this prestigious research grant, funded from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement N° 846284, I’m working closely with the International WELL Building Institute to target Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility (IDEA) as standards to guarantee environments suitable for all the population. The goal of the project is to understand and map challenges of the design process and points of exclusion in the user journey.

This research constitutes a path towards the development of more-than-human environments through Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility by leveraging the potential of qualitative and quantitative data.To foster a people-first approach I believe that what designers and engineers create has to be specifically tailored to each single customer need.

I strongly believe that we should aim for a world where products and environments are developed by people, for people, through the support of more-than-human systems. Trust, privacy, sustainability and social inclusion are pillars of this pan-disciplinary research path that spans across arts and humanities, STEM, health and well-being, ethics and education.

Semper ad maiora.