Martina Motta

Bio

Martina Motta is research fellow at the Design Department of Politecnico di Milano and a member of the faculty of Politecnico di Milano and Fashion Institute of Technology. Her research field and main area of competence is the contemporary fashion design with a deepening focus on knitwear design, knitting technologies and knitwear for social valorization.
Graduated in 2013 in Design for the Fashion System at Politecnico di Milano with a master’s degree thesis on Knitwear Design, since 2013 she has been teaching here knitwear design, portfolio presentation, graphic representation for knitwear and history of fashion, first as a teaching assistant, and since 2018 as a professor.
In 2019 she got a Ph.D. cum laude in Design, with a thesis focused on the tools and methods for design education oriented towards the specific reality of the knitwear industry. The dissertation gave the methodological groundworks of a didactical approach to knitwear design that is radically different from the traditional method, as it considers knitwear as a system where
each component -project, production, distribution, communication- should be considered as part of a whole system and consequently enter in the design process. This approach has been recognized as an academical innovation and thanks to this vision the most relevant Italian and International knitwear brands -like Missoni, Loro Piana, Zegna Baruffa Lane Borgosesia, Filmar, and many others- are now partners of the Politecnico Knitwear Design studio, working with the university on both teaching and research.
Working on experimenting this approach on an international level, she has been a visiting researcher and teacher at Birmingham City University in 2017/2018 and taught in several other international workshops.
In the latest years she has been also involved into research projects in this field, as SMART-K -that studied for the Italian knitwear sector a set of new technological tools, in order to solve the loss of competitiveness- and Digiknit -that digitized the archive of the knitwear factory MF1 with the aim to improve the accessibility of all the tangible assets of the company to scientific communities, designers, professionals, and R&D operators in the textile-clothing sector.
During the last three years she took part in research and knitwear design applications in the field of social innovation, as well as in the handicraft field to be discovered and developed.
Moreover, every activity in every area of interest is today pursued with an eye on sustainability, and from March 2020 she became a member of LeNS, the International Learning Network on Sustainability.
Since 2014 she is part of the editorial staff of the website www.knitlab.org.