Marco Ajovalasit is Associate Professor at the Department of Design, Politecnico di Milano, Italy. His research is in the field of “Design For Meaning”, "motivation research" and “human-centred innovation”. Focus is on understanding the meanings people assign to designed artefacts. The sense of the term 'meaning' involves the reasons why a person engages with something or someone, and the sense of purpose involved. In this view, designed artefacts can be resources that people use to attain their goals.

The 'Design For Meaning' research is based on the logic that people prioritise meanings alongside the functional benefits when shaping personality, self-identity and worldview. A person acquire a designed artefact not only because it provides some specific benefits , but because it becomes incorporated into the lifestyle of the person. Understanding people' s personality and the reasons why something or someone is significant and of value for them can be seen as the peculiar total of the artefact they acquire.

Research addresses the need for an increased attention and emphasis on the part of designers to the conceiving, measuring and validating of meaning. The objective is to develop a toolkit for designers for organising the consideration of the intended meaning of artefacts. The research aims to establish a linguistic vocabulary for constructing interview questions, questionnaires, and other ethnographic and co-design elements in relation to meaning. Particular emphasis is placed on the thinking process, dialogue and use of semantics consumers and designers typically associate to the understanding of the designed artefact. Research also focuses on identifying human centred design methods for the purpose of designing artefacts based on new meanings and new scenarios for the consumers, including the use of data, designing ethnography, projective techniques, real fictions and co-creation.

Prof. Ajovalasit has been Principal Investigator of several projects including a £3.2M Collaborative FP7 EU project “Light.Touch.Matters” (2013-2016), which focussed on a design-driven development of a fully new generation of smart materials that combine touch sensitivity with luminescence, based on latest developments in polymeric piezo materials and flexible OLEDs for care and well-being applications.

Prof. Ajovalasit has extensive knowledge of issues pertaining to human-centred design and to the human perception of sound and vibration
and their interpretation and verbalisation by the drivers in the automobile context, signal processing analysis and psychophysical test protocols.

At the Politecnico di Milano he teaches in the Metadesign courses for the Degree Course in Industrial Product Design, in the Final Synthesis Laboratory in the Master Degree Course in Digital and Interaction Design, and on the Ambassador Master Cpourse in the Design for Digital Transformation course in the Master Degree Course in Product Service System Design (PSSD). He has been teaching at the Politecnico di Milano, School of Design, since 2018. Prior to that he held the position of Reader in Design at Brunel University London in the United Kingdom where he conducted both research and teaching in the field of Human Factors Design for 18 years.

During his ten-year (2000-2010) collaborative research project with Shell Global Solutions Ltd, Prof Ajovalasit has developed industrial test methods for quantifying the human subjective response to haptic and acoustic stimuli as perceived by the driver at the steering wheel interface in automobiles. The research served as a starting point to understand how a driver’s feelings of engine roughness or unpleasantness change with changes in the chemical properties of the fuel so as to choose chemical compounds that meet and exceed customer expectations.

Prof. Ajovalasit has an M.Eng. equivalent degree in Mechanical Engineering (5-year course) awarded by The University of Studies of Palermo in Italy. He holds a Ph.D. degree in Human Factors and Engineeing obtained from The University of Sheffield, UK. He is a member of the Sound & Vibration Product Perception (SVPP) Committee of the Engineering Integrity Society (EIS), a member of the TSB Creative Industries, Knowledge Transfer Network