Curriculum
Laura Boffi is an interaction design researcher and practitioner with a background in product design. She earned a bachelor in Industrial Design from the Polytechnic of Turin, a Master in Design from the Design Academy and eventually she joined the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design as a student for the Interaction Design Program.
She likes engaging with people in their own context doing user research and involving them in design games, workshops and co-creation sessions that she designs expressly for the projects to get meaningful insights. From the fieldwork she discovers new opportunity areas where to ground design challenges and starts testing her ideas with people since the early stages of the concept, choosing every time the kind of prototype to build in order to take the project further and further through the co- creation with users. She crafts prototypes and experiences with different media, from paper to video scenarios, and she develops the concepts by reiterations between user testing and prototyping over all the design process. Besides engaging with the real people around whom designing new products/services or experiences, she also puts particular effort into the active involvement of all the actors involved in the project, being them either member of the project team who are not familiar with design thinking and process or external stakeholders. For this reason, Laura designs and conducts workshops to transfer fieldwork insights and future design directions, crafting the tools to be used in such workshops (from design games, service user journeys to collective brainstorms sessions). In particular, she has gained extensive experience in the design process sharing activities since being the design leader in different EU projects among a consortium of partners coming from other than design disciplines (such as electrical engineering, software development, medicine).
She is currently working at CIID - Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design- as an interaction design researcher, focusing on elderly people and their appropriation of technology for independent living and wellbeing. At the CIID, she is part of the Research group, currently working on the Helicopter project, an EU funded project about monitoring elderly people with integrated sensors network in their domestic landscape.
Laura is currently collaborating with CIID Consultancy as well, working on a project about the future of banking with an Italian bank group.
In the last few years, Laura also worked for Indesit Company, as a project manager and interaction designer on the Veritas project, an EU funded project about developing new design tools which would support designers and developers in designing products for impaired and disabled people, like Parkinson patients.
As a researcher, she has published her research findings in well known design and human- computer interaction conferences as well as in medical conferences as a pioneer in the introduction of design driven services in the health domain.
At the same time, Laura collaborates from her own studio as interaction designer, consultant and researcher with other companies and consultancies in Europe and US and gives invited lecture/workshops.
In June 2016, she joined Univerlecco as a visiting researcher for the Int-ARS program, which is a joint project for internationalisation together with Politecnico of Milano.
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Full CV available here
