Contributors

Alessio Franconi, Ph.D., is a designer and researcher focused on the intersection between design and circular economy. He is currently a research fellow at the Brunel Design for Sustainability research group of Brunel University, London. As a Fulbright scholar (2018/19), Alessio was a visiting researcher at the Rochester Institute of Technology, NY. He has experience in industrial design consultancy at Indesit Company, JP Industries, and various Startups; and international academic experience at Brunel University London, UK, University Iuav of Venice, IT, Delft Technical University, NL, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, TR, and California Polytechnic State University CA. In 2016, Alessio was recognized as one of the first Blue Economy experts in the world by Professor Gunter Pauli at the University of Pécs, H.

Nazli is a Research Fellow at Brunel University London. Her expertise areas are product repair, product longevity, design for behaviour change, and circular product design. Currently, she works in the PISCES project (WP6) that focuses on mitigating plastic waste in Indonesia. She is researching reusable, refillable, returnable packaging systems as a solution to the plastic packaging waste problem. Previously, she was a post-doc researcher at Linköping University in Sweden for three years. She completed her practice-based PhD at the Royal College of Art in 2017, funded by the Ministry of Economy in Turkey. During her PhD, she explored the possibilities of visible repair using a design-led methodology. Nazli has been involved in several international and national research projects, funded by Erasmus+, Vinnova, and UKRI. She holds an MSc and BID in Industrial Design and a BA in Sociology from the Middle East Technical University.

Sergio can make technology look simple, accessible, and approachable while also translating the human need for engineers. It's all in pursuit of what he's passionate about: helping companies unlock that internal confidence they need to become more resilient and digitally fit in an increasingly circular economy. As a Design Director at IDEO Europe based in London, Sergio sees product design as a way to shape behavior and lead to systemic change. He works with clients to turn what can be fixed environments into innovative ones populated with new skills—the kind needed to transition to more circular models and practices. He got a taste of IDEO as a client before joining the company, where he has helped one of the biggest fashion retailers in the world redesign its supply chain to make it more sustainable and efficient by having their teams collaborate better. What started as a high-level idea was ideated, tested, and implemented, with real tangible impact on the supply chain, in less than a year. Sergio started coding as a kid and spent his early career as a software engineer for tech start-ups before taking a job as business engineer lead for Yoox Net-a-Porter Group. He led a fast-paced team tasked with getting things done quickly, and it marked the point where he started to move away from the keyboard and toward the application of technology to solve for human-led needs.

Malahat Ghoreishi (M.Sc., LUT University, Finland) is a junior researcher in International Business and Entrepreneurship at LUT University School of Business and Management. Her research is in the context of “Industry 4.0 and Circular Economy Ecosystem”. She studies the role of different digital technologies, more specifically artificial intelligence (AI), as an enabler of circular business ecosystems and circular business model innovation, as well as entrepreneurial ecosystems.