Politecnico di Milano

Politecnico di Milano is ranked as one of the major technical European universities in the world and first in Italy in at least nine research areas: – Architecture and Built Environment – Art and Design – Computer Science & Information Systems – Civil & Structural Engineering – Chemical Engineering – Environmental Sciences – Mechanical, Aeronautical & Manufacturing Engineering – Mathematics – Materials Sciences POLIMI educational activities are organized into 5 schools: – School of Architecture Urban Planning Construction Engineering – School of Design – School of Civil, Environmental and Land Management Engineering – School of Industrial and Information Engineering – PhD School The personnel involved in education, also carries out research activities. These are organized into 12 departments. The research group directly involved in this project is affiliated with the Department of Mechanical Engineering (www.mecc.polimi.it) and most of the classes they teach belong to the School of Industrial and Information Engineering and to the School of Design. The Department of Mechanical Engineering has been rated as one of the top scientific institutions at global level: according to the QS World University Rankings 2021, it is ranked 15th worldwide, 6th at European level in the Engineering – Mechanical domain. Methods and Tools for Product Design, Machine design, industrial engineering methods, systematic innovation, and PLM systems are some of the several research topics. The activities are mainly performed in collaboration with the main public and private research bodies, with regional, national, European and international public bodies, who fund most of the research projects carried out. In addition, POLIMI cooperates with several Italian and international companies constituting a network capable of addressing industrial needs and requirements. The research group directly involved in thisproject, focused on engineering design methods and tools, has gained scientific and technological competences eventhrough the participation in several research projects in the areas of engineering education, design creativity, problem solving, engineering knowledge management, business process re-engineering, topological optimization, virtual reality, virtual prototyping of industrial products, multi-modal interaction.

The POLIMI unit’s competencies focus on product development and concern theory, methods and tools dedicated to the earliest stages of the product cycle, with a specific focus on innovation, e.g. Design creativity and innovation, CAD/CAE and PLM tools, Innovation driven business process re-engineering. The unit was involved in national and international projects: FORMAT project (FP7 Marie Curie – IAPP, www.format-project.eu) gathered universities and companies to collaborate together to study the existing manufacturing technologies for the white good industry to forecast future solutions that can boost the production of the same. SPARK project (www.spark-project.net – POLIMI promoter and coordinator), which brought Augmented Reality technologies to the creative industries, exploiting their potential in collaborative design settings. The ELPID project (www.elpid.org – Erasmus+) is a 3-year-long project that involve most of the partners that compose the consortium proposing the PRO HACKIN’ project and can boast three successful editions where students from four countries collaborated with top level companies in Europe (BSH, Electrolux, Siemens Mobility). The OIPEC project (www.oipec.eu – Erasmus+, coordinated by PoliMi) gathered universities from Europe, Russia and China in a capacity building framework to foster University-Company collaborations into an Open Innovation framework that also includes tailored teaching materials and handbooks to build Collaborative Open Innovation Labs.

Niccolò Becattini will be the leader of the POLIMI unit. He started working at Polimi from the second half of 2009 as a research assistant and during that time he also managed to get a PhD in Mechanical Engineering (2010-2012 – XXV cycle). He is assistant professor since 2015 and from the end of 2022 he is associate professor. His research interests focus on design methods and tools, with a specific focus on approaches and techniques that foster design creativity and innovation. He teaches classes of Methods of Technical Representation (7 ECTS), Mechanical Design Lab (4+3 ECTS) and Product Virtual Modeling (6 ECTS). He is currently the author of more than 65 contributions indexed in Scopus and WoS and 3 patent applications. His research activity was awarded for the best MS thesis on systematic innovation topics (Italian prize delivered by APEIRON – Italian Association for Systematic Innovation) and for the best Phd thesis/dissertation by the Computer and Information in Engineering division of ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers). He is part of the editorial board of the International Journal of Design Creativity and Innovation and reviews articles for more than 10 scientific international journals (Journal of Engineering Design’s reviewer of the year 2018) and for international conferences (e.g. DESIGN, ICED, ICDC, ICoRD, ASME IMECE, DCC). He reviewed projects for the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (2015). He contributed to the organization of the International Conference on Engineering Design 2015 (ICED15) and the 8th international conference on Design Computing and Cognition (DCC18) and to events at international conferences (2 workshops on Design Creativity for the Design Society’s Special Interest Group at DESIGN2018 and ICED19).

Other key people involved in this project are:

Gaetano Cascini, Full professor, with key competencies on design methods, design creativity, EU project management and coordination. Former coordinator of the Mechanical Engineering study course at Politecnico di Milano. He teaches classes of Methods of Technical Representation (7 ECTS), Mechanical Design Lab-A (4+3 ECTS), Methods and Tools for Systematic Innovation (6+6 ECTS).

Giandomenico Caruso, Associate Professor, with key competencies in Augmented Reality and Virtual Prototyping. He teaches classes of Methods of Technical Representation (7 ECTS) and CAD models (6 ECTS).