Starglide is an artist entrepreneur.

I was trained at the Politecnico di Milano and graduated in Architecture in 1996, in a time where the faculty of Design was still under construction. Architecture (and Design) was at the time taught and described as a “culture”, which aimed at improving people’s lives through concepts that can materialise into places, objects, experiences. In parallel, research (or at least the kind of research I was interested in) was about abstracting concepts, principles, and values from observing and experiencing.

It was an exercise of balancing practical theory and theoretic practice, and now I see myself as a thinker and a maker.

I am interested in and a product of the experiences I have, and reading is functional to enlarge my set of skills. I handle papers with caution, and field guides with confidence. I know how to use a pen, a pencil, a paintbrush and a brush, a saw, a welder, a shovel. I recognise plants, raise bees, craft my own clothes. The very diverse people that I met in my life taught me most of what I care about, know and remember.

I more or less briefly lived and worked in Milan, Barcelona, Miami and Brussels.

I am a product of the sports I practiced, and practice. I played soccer with a-critical dedication from the age of 10 to 17; then american football semi-professionally in Italy from 17 to 24. Now, I practice archery occasionally and kitesurf as much as possible. Sports taught me fun, patience, emotional resilience, constance and most importantly to form my opinions by observing how people behave on the field while mostly ignoring what they say from the sidelines.

I am a practitioner of permaculture. With time, I am increasing my consumer activism, working to (hopefully) soon become self-sustainable.

I strive to reduce my digital footprint. I stay away from platforms and brands that (literally or metaphorically) encage people, animal and plants. I pledge to never use or buy from Amazon, AirBnB, Uber, Google, Apple, Microsoft and the like, and to reduce to the minimum the use of closed source social media such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. As much as possible I use and promote alternative, open source, distributed services. When I was working in large organisations, I switched as much as possible proprietary design applications with their open source equivalents like Inkscape, Scribus, Gimp.

My personal laptop runs on Ubuntu and my office suite is Libreoffice. All the sites and online services I run and maintain, including this, are hosted on a virtual private server. I am the owner of its privacy policy, which minimizes tracking and does not monetize it.

Since July 1st, 2022 I am developing livepods.eu, a platform for beautiful regeneration.

Before then, I was employed for seven years by the European Commission, Directorate General Joint Research Centre. The experience in the European Commission has been unique and a peak moment. I will be forever grateful to the institution.

I was contracted since mid 2015 to be part of the EU Policy Lab, an experimental unit that helps EU institutions to integrate strategic design into their work methods. In a sense it is a first attempt to introduce new perspectives and new forms of research in the process, and its pioneering spirit was mostly the reason why I submitted my candidacy. I left the EU Policy Lab on December 1st, 2020, when I was offered a position in the New European Bauhaus unit.

In the seven years I helped introduce some key design principles in EU policy making, and applied complex-adaptive systems theory to create safe spaces for policy development. I contributed to the early conceptual development of the New European Bauhaus, and I recommended the “beautiful, sustainable, together” triad of values, translating the initial input from the EC President. I also developed the initial “sketchy”, “kidlike”, somehow controversial visual identity and contributed to introduce key complexity-aware principles for the design phase. Before I left, I contributed to set up and structure the New European Bauhaus community.

After the peak experience, from July 1st, 2022 I turned into an artist consultant. You will see my work here, or on the pages of livepods.eu.