Valentina Demarchi is a designer and PhD researcher from Apulia (Southern Italy), currently based in Lisbon. Situated at the intersection of sustainability frameworks, visualization research, and infrastructuring, her work investigates how design and HCI can make ocean-related concepts and frameworks more tangible, accessible, and actionable across diverse communities of practice.

Specifically, as part of her doctoral research, she is developing two multimedia visual systems that support knowledge translation and collaborative sense-making around coastal communities (the “Coastal Community Thinking Toolkit”) and Ocean Literacy (the “OL-in-One Compass”)—two areas of relevance to the UN Ocean Decade. The design and enactment of these visual systems represent her contribution to the Bauhaus of the Seas Sails’ vision of advancing ocean sustainability through designerly ways of knowing (https://bauhaus-seas.eu/). Her publications are available at https://dl.acm.org/profile/99661265618.

She holds degrees in Industrial Product Design (BSc) and Product-Service System Design (MSc), both from Politecnico di Milano, as well as a Double Degree in Multidisciplinary Innovation from Alta Scuola Politecnica. Prior to her PhD, she worked as an employee and consultant for non-profit organizations and international cooperation agencies. For her doctoral research, she is a recipient of the LARSyS Laboratory Scholarship No. UI/BD/154782/2023.