Dr Francesco Mazzarella

Biography

Dr Francesco Mazzarella is a design researcher, educator, and activist, striving to plant seeds of hope and change, especially working with marginalised communities. He is Reader in Design for Social Change, at London College of Fashion (LCF). His work at Centre for Sustainable Fashion (CSF) aims at exploring ways in which design activism can be used to create counter-narratives towards sustainability in fashion. Francesco's research spans the fields of design activism, textile craftsmanship, decolonising fashion, design for sustainability, social innovation, and place-making.
Francesco has experience in design research, education, and practice in the UK, Italy, the Netherlands, Hungary, Brazil, South Africa, Vietnam and Australia. He is a member of the Design Council Expert Network, Fellow of Advance HE, Co-founder of the DESIS Cluster on 'Design from the Margins' and of the Cumulus Working Group on 'Design Education for Social Change'. Francesco's work has been presented at international conferences and published in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings.
Previously, Francesco was AHRC Design Leadership Fellow Research Associate at ImaginationLancaster, with the aim to support design research for change. Francesco was the first researcher to be awarded a PhD from the AHRC Design Star CDT at Loughborough Design School in 2018. His doctoral research project explored how service design can be used to activate textile artisan communities to transition towards a sustainable future. Francesco was awarded a BSc in Industrial Design (Product Design) and an MSc in Ecodesign, both from the Politecnico di Torino in Italy. He has also been an exchange student at the University of Twente (the Netherlands) and at the Minas Gerais State University (Brazil).