Northeastern University’s College of Arts, Media and Design (CAMD) is pleased to welcome Paolo Ciuccarelli as Professor in the Department of Art + Design. Professor Ciuccarelli is an internationally recognized designer, scholar, and educator who comes to Northeastern from the Politecnico di Milano where he has served on faculty since 2001. At Northeastern, Ciuccarelli will serve as Founding Director of CAMD’s Center for Design (CfD). The central mission of the CfD will be to explore the nature of Design as an integrative, interdisciplinary field, and as such, the CfD will connect with other research units and labs at Northeastern to strengthen their capacities through the infusion of design principles, methods, and tools, and to help build humanics platforms across the university.

Professor Ciuccarelli is uniquely positioned to lead CAMD’s CfD. At Politecnico di Milano, he led several large-scale initiatives, and most importantly, he founded DensityDesign Research Lab, where he has served as Scientific Director since 2010. The lab, which Ciuccarelli strategically cultivated to be interdisciplinary and collaborative, focuses on the visual representation of complex social, organizational, and urban phenomena. It has earned an international reputation for developing tools and methods for making sense of data and technology through compelling data experiences and through the goal of making data a public asset, training many prominent and successful data designers. DesignDensity Lab boasts an impressive record of successfully funded collaborations with research centers around the world including work with the MediaLab Sciences-Po, France and the Humanities + Design Research Lab at Stanford University.

Professor Ciuccarelli’s research activity is rooted in the science of complexity and focuses on visual design as a tool to understand and access complex systems. He regards visual representation as a powerful tool to improve decision-making and action, and prioritizes the following in his design research strategies: embracing the full potential of interdisciplinary and applied research; harnessing the continuum between science and the humanities; nurturing an environment in which scholars and students are able to cultivate their competencies and responsibilities; and committing to social ideals that embrace the political role design, communication, data, and algorithms can play in society and public policy. His publications appear in important venues including Big Data & Society and the Leonardo journal, and he has published substantially in highly selective conference venues in computing, including Information Visualization and the Italian chapter of SIGCHI.

Ciuccarelli holds a Master of Science in Architecture from Politecnico di Milano. He has been invited as a visiting lecturer at well-known institutions around the world, including Glasgow School of Art (UK), ENSCI Les Ateliers (F), The Royal College of Arts (UK), the British Higher School of Art and Design (Moscow), the Stanford Humanities Centre (California), and the China Central Academy for Fine Arts (Beijing). He has been a member of the board of the PhD in Design at Politecnico and since 2009, he has led “Public Engagement with Science and Technology” for students across all disciplines in the PhD School, a course which he also developed; he has also been invited to collaborate with a range of universities, fostering the integration of design culture and methods across disciplines such as management, computer science, statistics, data science, and communication studies. Since 2016 he has been on the founding committee of the “DataShack” – Communication Design + Computer Science – joint initiative between Politecnico di Milano and Harvard University – Institute for Applied Computer Science (IACS).

Paolo Ciuccarelli’s first day will be March 15. Please join us in welcoming him as a professor in CAMD’s Department of Art + Design.