26th February 2024 | Revised in July 2024
Workshop with residents and local gov members, Friulan Dolomites, 2023
Exactly five years ago, on the morning of 26th February 2019, I closed the door of my flat in Soldiner Strasse, Berlin. And with that closed door also came the end of my German adventure and agency career. I had three goals: living in the Italian mountains, building a new family, and starting from scratch with design.
Today, I’ve achieved all three, but most importantly, I feel true to myself and -yay- moderately happy. First, I must praise frugalism – downshifting, stinginess, name it as you like. Reducing costs went hand in hand with a better quality of life: garden food, more outdoor activities, less digital distraction; but above all, it allowed me to work less, and choose more suited gigs. In the remaining time, I’ve been enjoying my kid in a highly natural environment, and I’ve had the freedom to explore how design could help under-looked communities and places – like the one I live in – thrive.
In these years, I’ve set up a long-run participatory experiment in neighboring municipalities and I’ve co-founded a hyper-local non-profit. Efforts that not only helped me learn more about this land but proved instrumental in developing new design approaches, tools,…and local, slightly different clients and projects.
An example is the study circle on landscape and community transformations I’m working on for the Friulan Dolomites ecomuseum. Similar but extremely different from the mainstream design stuff I do. Oh, and tremendously more rewarding. Gigs like this rely on generative research, they positively impact places and people you extensively relate to, and most importantly they do not aim to generate profit at all costs. Guess what, it is still design – IMHO, at its best. Especially today, when the industry seems increasingly arrogant, superficial, elitist, and technological – despite the bullshit about inclusivity and sustainability they fill their positioning with.
Back to my five years here and the firsthand experience of problems in these fragile territories: having seen the positive outcomes of collective, bottom-up, multidisciplinary approaches, I’ve grown profoundly convinced such characteristics are essential to instigate change where no one would bet it could happen. That is also why, after long conversations with a group of landscape architects and strategic forecasting experts (Iiving in or in love with the less exclusive parts of our country), we have decided to launch a new studio of five working on tactical solutions for Italy’s mountain and rural territories.
The idea is to provide undervalued contexts with immersive research, participatory design, and rapid prototyping as an immediate response to long-term strategic change and permanent benefits we’d imagine with the local community; spanning across environmental, architectural, and service levels.
Sooner or later, success or failure, I will share more about this.