Designers Andrea Baronchelli

Andrea Baronchelli is Associate Professor at City University of London and Token Economy theme lead at The Alan Turing Institute in London.

His research focuses on understanding how we shape, and are shaped by, the socio-technical systems we inhabit. When individuals or communities adopt a technology, they often use it in a way that was not originally envisioned by the creator. This kicks off a process of co-evolution between the technology and human behaviour, which involves design as well as politics.

Andrea investigates these dynamics with a multidisciplinary approach and from different angles that include the study of networks, the dynamics of social norms, human categorisation, collective behaviour change and cryptocurrency ecosystems. His methodology includes the analysis of large amounts of data, mathematical modelling, and lab experiments with human subjects.

Andrea’s research has appeared in a leading scietnific journals including Science, PNAS, Nature Human Behaviour, Science Advances, Nature Communications, Physical Review Letters and Trends in Cognitive Science. It has been extensively covered by the media (NYT, The Economist, Washington Post, BBC, Le Monde, La Repubblica, Scientific American, MIT Tech Review and, in Italy, Il Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica e Il Sole 24 Ore), and supported by public and private bodies.

Besides academia, Andrea regularly helps start-ups and companies in the tech space improve their products by assessing, and anticipating, the behaviour of the communities they aim to reach.