Francesco Frulio

Francesco was born in London in 1988. In 2013 he graduated in Industrial Design at the University of Architecture of Alghero and continued his study path at the Politecnico di Milano in Product Design for Innovation, where he obtained the Master Degree in 2017. He works in different fields of Design, from product to graphic design and illustration. Francesco has exhibited several of his works in many events such as the Milan Design Week, the furniture fair “Io Casa” and the “Sguardi Altrove” Film Festival.

Cortex. Development and application of a new kind of smart skin for automotive field.

In the last years, the huge explosion of mass electronics, the radical computerization of society and the ubiquitous presence of the internet have led to the birth of a new category of items that interact with us and think for us. This newborn category of smart objects is characterized by a dualistic system in which the body and components that generate information are on two separate dimensions that often don’t communicate with each other. With the advent of the internet, our awareness of how much the physical and digital environments are shading into one single entity is increasing. Would it then be possible to go down to an even deeper level and make creating and communicating information, energy and data the same material as the object itself? This research develops around this question. In a context in which the way of distributing energy and information within the physical environment is changing, the automotive industry does not ignore this tendency; It is in this area that Francesco’s research is aimed at developing a conductive composite material that can partly replace the regular copper cabling of today’s vehicles by using a new “composite” skin that can carry energy and signals electric.