ABOUT
Sara is a Research Scientist at the Center for Design, Northeastern University (Boston, USA), where she works on design, emerging technologies, and ethics.
Before joining Northeastern, she was a Senior Research Associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Design Lab, where she led projects on designing and prototyping future user experiences enabled by emerging technologies.
In the past few years, her research interests have shifted towards the impact emerging technologies have on users when embedded in everyday objects, and their consequences on human experience and behaviors at the individual and societal levels. She believes in the power of design to envision future worlds, and to inspire a more just and ethical development of technology and society.
BIO
Sara graduated in design&engineering with honors at Politecnico di Milano. She earned a PhD cum laude in Design from Politecnico di Milano. She spent part of her doctoral studies as a visiting PhD at the Interactive Institute – Swedish ICT (Sweden). During her PhD, she explored the human sensory, cognitive, and emotional experience of connected, intelligent and dynamic artifacts. In particular, she investigated and designed new tangible and sensory forms of communication performed by dynamic objects.
During her work at the MIT Design Lab, Sara adopted design fiction as an approach to envision future solutions based on cutting-edge technologies and focused on human experiences. She led teams of designers, computer scientists, and engineers in designing and prototyping connected ecosystems of digital/physical solutions. She makes use of rapid prototyping, 3D printing technologies, and video storytelling to generate and communicate proof-of-concepts for the future realities she designs (see an example here).
She has published widely on these topics through journal articles, conference papers, and books. She chaired the DeSForM conference at MIT in 2019 and she chaired multiple tracks at international conferences in the field of interaction design. She has served as a reviewer and board member for scientific conferences and journals in the areas of user experience, interaction design, and HCI (among which ACM DIS and PETRA). She has been a reviewer for government entities such as NIH.
She holds two patents on interactive devices for children’s health and wellbeing. These solutions are based on the outcome of her doctoral studies on sensory and emotional communication.
Sara has been invited lecturer and speaker in educational courses and professional workshops at MIT and at other institutions worldwide, such as Université Laval (Quebec City, Canada), Tsinghua University (Beijing, China), Xi’an Jiaotong University (Xi’an, China), and Politecnico di Milano (Milan, Italy). In 2018, she was invited to visit Victoria University of Wellington under the Fulbright New Zealand program.
Before joining Northeastern University, Sara was a Lecturer in interaction and experience design at MIT (CMS/W), and an adjunct professor in design&engineering and interaction design at Politecnico di Milano. She served as both supervisor and external examiner of graduate and undergraduate students at MIT, Politecnico di Milano, and Victoria University of Wellington.