We are happy to have Francesca Montagna as a guest researcher in the research group Systems Engineering Design Laboratory. Francesca is Associate Professor of Manufacturing Technology and Systems at Politecnico di Torino. She’s visiting Chalmers during January and February 2023. We took the opportunity to ask three questions about her research.
Francesca, can you tell us about your current research?
“My research topics generally range from Innovation Management, Technology Management and Engineering Design and, more specifically, Design Methods. At the moment, I’m working on investigating the impact of digitalization on product development, how requirements in this context are changing and more generally, the role of digital affordance. In parallel, I’m working on topics related to manufacturing systems, and specifically social sustainable factories. In this domain I’m working through neuroscientific measures, to investigate stress and fatigue at production workplaces.”
How did you become interested in this area of research?
“As background, I’m an industrial engineer, specialized in Management. Since the beginning, I have observed that technical engineers were far from investigating many aspects that affect their technical activity or from knowing the impact of their research activity and design decisions on business. On the other side, business people were complete unfamiliar with technological issues. Therefore, I was immediately interested in being in the middle. Engineering Design as domain was the consequence, since Design always is in the middle between technology and business issues.
My interests about Production Systems, instead, were mainly driven by the context in which I work. My department at Politecnico di Torino is the department of Management and Production Systems. There, I collaborated with many colleagues of that field, usually to design and improve production systems. Nowadays, the way we have to improve manufacturing systems, since we have already digitalized them, is focusing on their sustainability. Since my background, I decided to focus on workers and the social aspects of sustainability; and specifically on designing less stress manufacturing workplaces.”
How do you see your research impacting society or contributing to advancements in your field?
“For what concerns the activities in Innovation Management, every day I have to reflect on how to drive a technology toward the adoption, how to help other colleagues in transforming the novelty of their technology into a real innovation. With respect to the activities in the Production System domain, I’m contributing within the rest of community of researchers toward more sustainable manufacturing systems.”
About Franscesca
Francesca Montagna (PhD), is Associate Professor of Manufacturing Technology and Systems at Politecnico di Torino. Research topics range from Innovation Management, Technology Management and Engineering Design. Lecturing has been mainly carried out in the curriculum degree of Industrial Engineering and Management, but also in Mechanical Engineering, Industrial Design and Data Science Programs at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. She is Member of A.I.TE.M. and of Design Society, serving its advisory board. She usually serves as reviewer on conferences (e.g. ICED, DESIGN and IFAC-INCOM), besides journals (e.g. RED, IJATM, JPME). She often collaborates with public or private organizations on research and consultancy projects in the fields of Innovation Management, Product and Service Design, Marketing. Often she is evaluator of innovation projects at national as international level.