Canina Maria Rita

Marita Canina, PhD, is Associate Professor in Design Futures at the Department and School of Design, Politecnico di Milano. She is also Scientific Director of the IDEActivity Center, a research hub she founded to advance creativity as a driver of design-led innovation.

Her research integrates design, creativity studies, and emerging technologies, within a people- and planet-centred perspective. She focuses on how Design Futures and creative processes can support the understanding and shaping of digital transitions. Her work develops models, frameworks, and methods for sustainable and responsible innovation, with particular attention to the impact of digital transformation on creative, educational, and design processes. She investigates how design can support organisations, institutions, and companies in anticipating future scenarios, addressing socio-technical complexity, and guiding responsible transformation processes. She also contributes to the development of theoretical and methodological approaches integrating futures thinking, design, and participatory practices to support decision-making in complex contexts.

Since 2015, she has led and coordinated several European research projects on digital transformation, innovation ecosystems, and future skills. Among these, she coordinated the Horizon Europe project MUSAE (2022–2025), which develops and applies the Design Futures Art-driven model within European Digital Innovation Hubs to guide responsible technological innovation, particularly in the food sector. She also led the Erasmus+ project DC4DM – Digital Creativity for Developing Digital Maturity (2020–2023), which developed models and tools for creative and digital skills, including challenge-based experimental learning environments (Learning Labs) and transferable educational toolkits. Her research also explores the relationship between Artificial Intelligence and creativity.

Her interdisciplinary background includes biodesign, wearable technologies, and bio-robotics, developed through research experiences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Robotics Laboratory of Politecnico di Milano. Building on this, her work translates technological innovation into human-centred design approaches, with applications in healthcare, food systems, and complex socio-technical domains, in collaboration with public institutions, companies, startups, and SMEs.

She teaches Design Futures and design studios, contributing to the integration of research and education and to the development of advanced interdisciplinary approaches for training designers capable of operating in future-oriented and complex scenarios. Since 2021, she has also been teaching at the Polimi PhD School in the course Creative and Design Thinking and in executive education programs at Poli.Design on Creative Thinking, Design Thinking, and Design Futures.

She is the author of international scientific publications, a reviewer for leading journals and conferences, and a member of international research networks in creativity, futures studies, and design research.