Michele Francovigh

Lead Project Engineer at Fincantieri

Fincantieri designs and builds merchant vessels, passenger ships, offshore, and naval vessels, and is also active in the conversion and ship repair sectors. Today Fincantieri is one of Europe’s largest shipbuilding groups and the largest in the Mediterranean. Fincantieri employs a staff of about 10,000 (rising to approximately 20,000 if the supply chain is included) working at eight shipyards, two design centers, one research center, and two production sites for mechanical components.

Michele is responsible of the technical configuration of the ship, in compliance with the project timing and costs targets. The main tasks of this role are: at project kick-off stage, to analyse the contractual documents and to verify their completeness and consistency for the development of the project; to collect and integrate the Project Risks Assessment, in collaboration with the Technical department; to define with the Project Manager relevant mitigating actions and monitoring their progress; and to monitor and coordinate the basic and constructive design development of the whole ship during all the project stages, granting the correspondence with the contractual specifications.

The Rise of Factory-built Housing: Episode 5

In 2012, six single-family homes were made by a 3D printer in China. The inventor of that technology is now working on a 3D printer designed to construct buildings on Mars. Does this technology have a future on Earth? Or does the future of homebuilding involve modern factories that leverage robots to build wood or steel framing similar to the types of machines you might find in modern automotive plants?

Images & videos courtesy of Michele Francovigh & Luigi Sauro

Predicting Our Future