Marina Ricci

<p>Marina Ricci has been a Postdoctoral Researcher since 2024 at the Institute of Intelligent Industrial Technologies and Systems for Advanced Manufacturing (STIIMA-CNR), Bari-Amendola. Since 2026, she has also been teaching UX Design in the Master&rsquo;s Degree Programme in Design at the Polytechnic University of Bari, where she has been collaborating with the Design Research Group on several research projects since 2019.</p>
<p>In 2018, she received a bachelor's degree in Industrial Design with honors, and in 2020, a master's degree in Industrial Design with honors at the Polytechnic University of Bari. Her main research interests lie in the field of Interaction and Multisensory Design, with a particular focus on the use of innovative perceptual and interactive techniques for the design of technology-mediated experiences, such as virtual reality.</p>
<p>In 2024, she earned her Ph.D. in Industry 4.0 with a dissertation entitled &ldquo;Designing next-generation retail experiences via virtual reality and pseudo-haptics&rdquo;, which was awarded as the Best National Doctoral Thesis (Virtual Prototyping section) by the Italian Association of Design and Methods for Industrial Engineering (ADM). Between 2022 and 2023, she was a Visiting Ph.D. Student at the Perceptual Intelligence Lab of TU Delft (The Netherlands), where she investigated novel approaches to integrating visuo-tactile stimuli into online retail experiences through pseudo-haptics. In 2025, she was awarded the CNR Short-Term Mobility Fellowship to conduct research at the University College London Interaction Centre (UK), focusing on the use of visual metaphors in VR for cross-modal communication.</p>
<p>In 2026, she will serve as Co-Chair of the Responsible Retail and Branded Environments Track at the DRS 2026 Edinburgh International Conference. She also received the Emerging Scholar Award at the Twentieth International Conference on Design Principles &amp; Practices 2026 and was selected for the ADI Design Index 2024 with the project Fashion Augmented Information.</p>