Marita Canina

Marita Canina holds a Ph.D. in Industrial Design. She is Associate Professor at the Department and School of Design at Politecnico di Milano, where she is also Scientific Director of the IDEActivity Center, a research network and a center of Excellence in Creativity and Design within the Design Department of Politecnico di Milano. She founded IDEActivity in 2013 to give value to all aspects of creativity, promoting innovation through design, as well as to activate and re-enforce all phases of the “creative process” within any given context. IDEActivity combines research in design, studies on creativity and co-design dynamics to offer organisations tools and methods capable of fostering and activating the creative approach that facilitates innovation processes through design. Since 2015, IDEActivity is investigating the impact of the digital transition on creative abilities at different stages of the design process experimenting with new approaches based on design thinking. She coordinates researches funded by the European Community and other national and international organizations, including the latest Horizon Europe MUSAE: a human-centred factory for a future technological sustainable development driven by arts (2022-2025) aiming to set up the MUSAE Factory Model based on the Design Future Art-driven method to be included in the (E)DIHs to strategically guide digital technology innovation and address future challenges in the food domain to improve people and planet wellbeing, the Erasmus+ “Digital Creativity for developing Digital Maturity future skills” (2020-2023), aiming to implement and apply a human-centred design model to strategically guide the ongoing process of digital evolution for achieving Digital Maturity through people creative enhancement and EC project "Digital Do-It-Yourself" (2015-2017), which analyzed the phenomenon of social innovation enabled by the use of digital tools.
Since 2008, she has been teaching several Design School courses applying creativity to the human-centred approach (HCD) and Design Thinking (DT) method. She carries out designing and learning activities within teaching programs for SMEs, Public Administrations and Organizations always based on the blend of creativity, HCD and DT.
In 2006 she was PostDoc Associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she contributed to a wearable technology research program for an EVA spacesuit (Bio-suit) working on the Line of Non-Extension theory developed by Iberall.
She's author of several international publications on creativity education and design thinking.