Victor G. Martinez PhD
Chancellor's Chair
- Research Group: FutureXplorations
Bio:
Victor is an industrial designer with 24 years of experience in the transportation sector. He started his professional career as a car designer in Mexico and later in Italy collaborating on projects for FIAT, Alfa Romeo, Audi, Italdesign-Giugiaro among many others. He has worked as an independent industrial designer for 18 years winning a Red Dot Award in 2007. In 2009 he cofounded Ecopilia, a spin-off company from his research on biodegradable materials. He has 18 years of experience teaching industrial/product design, and as a researcher has explored the fields of biodegradable materials, alternative urban mobility and systems thinking for design.
Victor received his PhD in 2016 from Northumbria University, UK. The project explores the early stages of new product development and how to integrate sustainability criteria. As part of his research he developed Trophec, an online product lifecycle visualisation tool: trophec.com
He has lectured in Mexico, Canada, Slovenia, Ecuador, Chile, Spain, Italy, France, Germany, India and the UK.
His personal interest subjects are systems thinking, complexity theory, sustainability and new business models, all applied to the design processes of products, services or entire systems.
Areas of research:
Alternative urban mobility systems, biodegradable/recyclable materials, and sustainability and systems thinking for design.
Current projects:
FutureXplorations: a community-based research project where we help communities untangle the complex challenges they see in their future; we guide them in the process of exploring the possible futures and collaborate to design and implement actions to take them there. We work together with communities through workshops, training sessions, research, design, planning and implementation. We follow a specific methodology we created based on 14 years of working with complex social