Summary
Dr Marco Aurisicchio is Reader - Associate Professor - in Engineering Design in the Dyson School at Imperial College London. His current roles include:
- Research Excellence Framework (REF) lead for the Dyson School of Design Engineering.
- Academic lead in the London Interdisciplinary Social Science (LISS) Doctoral Training Partnership (DTP).
- Co-lead Ocean Plastic Network.
- External associate at the Human Centered Systems Lab at NASA's Ames Research Center.
- Course leader for the 2nd year Design and Sustainability module taught in the MEng in Design Engineering.
- Tutor in the Innovation Design Engineering (IDE) programme between Imperial College and the Royal College of Art.
- Academic champion for the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) Visiting Professor in the School.
Marco has had the roles of Director of Research and Director of Postgraduate Studies in the Dyson School. Prior to joining the School, he was a Senior Lecturer in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Imperial. He joined Imperial from the Engineering Design Centre at the University of Cambridge where he studied his Ph.D. in Engineering Design and then progressed to a Research Associate post. During his doctoral and postdoctoral research, he worked within the BAE Systems and Rolls-Royce University Technology Partnership for Design. Marco received a Laurea in Mechanical Engineering from the Universita’ degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza" in 2000.
He currently leads a team of four PhD students and one Research Associate. As part of his research Marco has collaborated with various businesses and agencies including Procter & Gamble (Gillette), Nestle, Weir Minerals, Laing O'Rourke, CERN, Nacco Materials Handling Group, NASA, Solar Turbines, Rolls-Royce, BAE Systems, and Smiths Medical International.
His research interests are in the following areas.
Sustainable consumption and manufacturing. To support the shift towards a circular economy he has investigated the use of product-service systems to produce closed resource loops and the role of consumers. He has also conducted studies to research the difference between recycling and reuse behaviours and to model behaviour chains in reuse systems.
Construction as manufacturing. His work in this area has focused on the design and optimisation of supply chains for modular construction projects and understanding the root causes of schedule deviation in construction.
User experience and human-product interaction. To support designers in industry, he has conducted research to model user experience and understand affective experiences with durable products including consumer electronics.
Engineering safety-critical systems. In this area, he has conducted studies of engineers’ information seeking behaviour, and investigated methods for design rationale capture and functional modelling. He started this research in collaboration with Rolls-Royce and then took it to NASA's Ames Research Centre where he collaborates with the Human-Centered Systems Lab. As part of this work he has been involved in the research and development of two visual knowledge capture tools: 1) Decision Rationale editor (DRed); and 2) design Visual Understanding Environment (designVUE).
Active research projects
Two P&G and EPSRC iCASE projects.
EPSRC project called 'Holistic integration of technology, design and policy for a greener plastic future'.
Enquiries from potential research students interested in working in any of the above research areas are welcome.
Publications
Journals
Muranko Z, Tassell C, Zeeuw van der Laan A, et al., 2021, Characterisation and Environmental Value Proposition of Reuse Models for Fast-Moving Consumer Goods: Reusable Packaging and Products, Sustainability, Vol:13
Conference
Aurisicchio M, Yang X, Designing Conversational Agents: A Self-Determination Theory Approach, 2021 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2021)
Aurisicchio M, Zeeuw Van Der Laan A, Tennant M, Material-Service Systems for Sustainable Resource Management, EcoDesign 2019
Aurisicchio M, Tassell C, The Evolution of Reuse and Recycling Behaviours: An Integrative Review with Application to the Fast-Moving Consumer Goods Industry, Proceedings of the IS4CE2020 Conference of the International Society for the Circular Economy