Silvia Cantalupi

Silvia is a designer and a design researcher with a strong interest in social innovation, participatory approaches and public engagement.

After graduating in Industrial Product Design at 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 called Tangible EU – a strategy for a grounded inquiry of the European Union, which aimed to explore the perceptions young European citizens have of the European Union (2018), engaging with local stakeholders and policymakers.

As a post-graduate design researcher, she worked for the Innovation School at the Collaborative Futures project, a four-months collaboration between the Royal Bank of Scotland, researchers and students looking at developing near-future scenarios and design directions for the banking system (2018). Following a brief period as a trainee at Next Nature Network – in the Netherlands (2019) – where she better explored the themes of speculative and critical design, Silvia continued to work for the Innovation School as Research Associate, investigating and applying participatory and co-design approaches (2019- 2022). She took part in projects related to speculative design, design training, financial wellbeing, fuel poverty and health & care, partnering with some of the most relevant actors in the Scottish landscape, such as the Royal Bank of Scotland, the Digital Health and Care Innovation Centre, NHS Scotland, the British Red Cross and the Glasgow Science Centre.

Silvia is currently a Ph.D. student in Design at Politecnico di Milano, where she is carrying out an inquiry around the phenomenon of design activism in urban public spaces, stressing on the exploration of the relationships between design for social change, spatial design and ‘the political’.