Silvia Cantalupi

Silvia is a designer and design researcher with a strong interest in social innovation, participatory approaches and citizen involvement in design processes.

After graduating in Industrial Product Design from the Politecnico di Milano (2017), she continued her studies at the Innovation School of The Glasgow School of Art, attending the Master of Design in Design Innovation and Citizenship. She graduated with a research project entitled Tangible EU – a strategy for a grounded inquiry of the European Union, exploring the perceptions that young European citizens have of the European Union (2018) and involving local stakeholders and policymakers.

As a design researcher, she worked for the Innovation School at the Glasgow School of Art on the Collaborative Futures project, a four-month collaboration between the Royal Bank of Scotland, researchers and students with the aim of developing scenarios for the near future and design directions for the banking system (2018). After a short period as an intern at Next Nature Network in the Netherlands (2019), where she explored the themes of speculative and critical design, Silvia continued to work as a researcher for the Innovation School, investigating and applying participatory and co-design approaches (2019-2022). She has taken part in projects related to speculative design, design education, financial wellbeing, energy poverty, and wellbeing and care, collaborating with some of the most relevant players on the Scottish scene, such as the Royal Bank of Scotland, Digital Health and Care Innovation Centre, NHS Scotland, British Red Cross, and Glasgow Science Centre.

Silvia is currently a PhD student in Design at the Politecnico di Milano, where she is conducting research on the phenomenon of design activism in urban public spaces, with a focus on exploring the relationships between design for social change and the design of spaces.