Carlo Forcolini出生于1947年，于1969年毕业于米兰布雷拉美术学院。从1975年至1979年，他曾与ICF De Padova合作，同时也开始与意大利设计界的大师之一Vico Magistretti合作。从1978年至1984年，他居住于伦敦，并在那里联合创立了Alias，并成为了Artemide GB的总监。 他于1992年创立了Nemo，并于1999年创立了Forcolini.Lab，随后于2005年创立了Oylight。 在从业的这几年，他曾为Amar，Cassina，BBB Bonacina，Luceplan，Luci Italia，Gervasoni，Joint和Pomellato等公司设计过作品。从2001年至2007年，他曾担任过ADI（意大利工业设计协会）的主席，并于2007年被任命为Consiglio Italiano del Design（意大利设计委员会）的成员。 从2009年至2014年，他曾按序担任过IED集团的首席执行官，副总裁，最终成为该集团的学术总监。他的设计作品被收藏于纽约Cooper Hewitt博物馆，巴黎装饰艺术博物馆，米兰三年展设计博物馆以及ADI Compasso d’Oro（意大利黄金罗盘奖项）。他曾于马德里，洛杉矶，伦敦，汉堡，科隆，东京，悉尼，圣地亚哥，莫斯科，奥斯陆，那不勒斯，米兰，多伦多和布鲁塞尔等多个城市中展览过其艺术作品

Alessandra Mauro出生于罗马，是一名记者，拥有文学学位。在大学毕业后，她靠着巴黎高等社会科学研究学院提供的奖学金先后研究了古代地图、旅游手札、以及地理信息是如何从文字展现演变到图像展现。在回到意大利后，她在《Sfera》杂志的编辑部工作了多年，又在90年代初开始为《Contrasto》杂志工作，同时也负责一些展览和摄影项目。自2005年创立以来，她一直担任米兰Forma Per la Fotografia基金会的艺术总监，同时也是罗马Contrasto出版社的总监。作为策展人，她构思和组织了几个回顾性的摄影展览，包括：William Klein - Roma，Mario Giacomelli - La figura nera aspetta il bianco，Mimmo Jodice - Perdersi a guardare，Gordon Parks - una storia americana，Gianni Berengo Gardin e Elliott Erwitt -Un’amicizia ai sali d’argento, Walter Bonatti - Fotografie dai grandi spazi，Gianni Berengo Gardin - Vera fotografia和许多其他在意大利，法国，德国，日本，韩国，瑞典等国家的博物馆展出的展览。 作为《Contrasto》杂志的艺术总监，她与Henri Cartier-Bresson, Sebastião Salgado, Richard Avedon, Herb Ritts, Teju Cole 等许多著名作家合作，出版了多本重要书籍。她在罗马三大（University of Roma Tre）和罗马路易斯学院（Luiss of Rome）教学摄影，同时为维基广播电台（wikiradio di radiotre）制作了十来集关于摄影大师的节目。 她与梵蒂冈博物馆合作，为当代艺术收藏系列创作了博物馆的摄影收藏系列。严格意义上来说，与梵蒂冈博物馆的合作机会来自于一次展览，名为In piena luce: 九名摄影师诠释了梵蒂冈博物馆，米兰，皇宫，2018年5月至6月。她同时也是Photoshow的作者。Le Principali Mostre della Storia della Fotografia，2014年（意大利版：Contrasto；英文版：Thames&Hudson，中文版），Ombre di Guerra e lo Sguardo da Sud（Napoli，L'Ancora，1999年）。

Gianpietro Vigorelli出生于1951年，他是意大利广告界近几十年的业界指标。在他的职业生涯中，他一直都是知名广告企业的掌舵人。他于1987年担任Saatchi&Saatchi广告公司的创意总监，并在1992年为其制作了一系列由伍迪·艾伦执导的广告。他于1994年加入了Young&Rubicam，并在此为Barilla制作了由John Landis执导的广告。他于1997年和他的合作伙伴Maurizio D’Adda共同策划了该年的意大利San Remo流行音乐节。与此同时，他又在同年与两位挚友Maurizio D’Adda 和 Riccardo Lorenzini成立了自己的广告公司，该公司在2000年与意大利BBDO公司合并，Gianpietro Vigorelli开始担任DLV-BBDO公司的副总裁和创意总监。在担任总监的期间，他又为Danone, Philips, Pirelli, Renault, Motta, Pupa, Barilla and Tè Ati等公司策划了广告活动。他在2010年从BBDO的总裁职位退休，并开始担任世界级的广告顾问。他的第一份工作曾是一名版画师。

Marc Sadler是一位出生于奥地利的法国公民，作为一名设计师，他曾在法国，美国，亚洲和意大利生活和工作过。他是巴黎高等装饰艺术学院Esthétique industrielle（工业美学）专业的首批毕业生之一，他的毕业论文研究方向为塑料学，他也是开展不同材料和技术之间污染实验的先驱，而如今，这正是他的作品的独特之处。七十年代初，他设计了第一款由100％可回收热塑性材料制成的滑雪靴，由意大利公司Caber（后来成为Lotto）工业化生产。凭借其出色的性格，他如今已成为许多行业公司的顾问。他的作品曾 4 次获得工业设计协会 ADI 公司授予的 Compasso d’Oro 奖项( 1994 年、2001 年、2008 年和 2014 年)。他为Dainese设计的背部保护装置在纽约现代艺术博物馆的永久收藏中展出，而他为Foscarini设计的Mite灯可以在巴黎蓬皮杜艺术中心的设计系列中看到。他对绘画和素描充满热情，认为这是他此生的挚爱兴趣。

Cristina Ortiz 出生于西班牙阿拉贡自治区，并在加那利群岛的特内里费岛度过了她生命中的前十六年。这个有着火山，大海和灿烂阳光的海岛为Cristina创造了一个完美的环境，让她的创造力可以得到最好的发挥。她于1986年毕业于巴黎服装工会学院, 随后开始在时装界展露才华，而她的设计天赋也使其受到了国际大牌的青睐。她曾在Prada女装部担任创意总监至1997年，又在该年成为了Lanvin女装成衣和配饰的创意总监。在这之后，Cristina又将多年累积的经验带到了Brioni，担任该品牌女装系列的创意总监直至2008年，她在该年离开Brioni, 进入Ferragamo. 在这里，她成功的让Ferragamo重拾往日的魅力，在恢复该品牌的昔日辉煌时，也成功的将其改造成一个极具个性的现代品牌。她泰若自然且充满活力的性格，以及受过的多元化文化的熏陶，全都体现在她的设计作品中：恰到好处的优雅。她现与多家品牌合作，同时也专注于推出自己珠宝系列的准备工作。

作为一名建筑师，他曾与Alfred Hohenegger, Giorgio Fioravanti, Gianni Sassi一起学习和接受培训，后于纽约视觉艺术学院接受教育。他曾在G&R Associati工作室担任Emilio Fioravanti的助理，并于1985年和Guglielmo Ghizzardi以及Mario Piazza两位合伙人在米兰成立了第一家属于他们自己的工作室。他于1995年创立了A+G Achilli Ghizzardi Associati工作室，至今仍是其管理人，同时负责跟建筑，品牌，展览设计，平面设计等相关的工作。 在从业三十多年来，他的客户包括了工业和商业集团，出版业和各大国际组织。他在设计学院有着丰富的教学经验，目前在米兰的IULM大学任教，教授品牌识别。他是北伊利诺伊大学的客座教授，曾在巴勒莫大学、芝加哥艺术学院、米兰理工学院、威尼斯国际大学和其他大学举办讲座。它曾因出色的教学能力获得了伦敦设计与艺术指导协会颁发的十项大奖。他曾撰写并编辑了有关设计的出版物，他的作品也曾出现在最重要的国际杂志上。

Founded in Milan in 1997 by Andrea Bacaloni, Francesco Cavalli, Bruno Genovese and David Pasquali, Leftloft is an independent design office where ideas, people and skills are encouraged to flow together and merge to develop a broader vision of design, of culture and of communication. In 2009, Leftloft also opened an office in New York. The office operates with a design team in which each individual is specialised in several fields, from branding to web design. Leftloft has put its name to many projects in Italy and across the world, partnering with some of the most important private-sector businesses and public-sector institutions in Italy and elsewhere, such as the Inter football club, Mondadori, the Milan Triennale, dOCUMENTA (3), Cassina, Colmar, Pirelli Hangar-Bicocca, subito.it, the Istanbul Biennale, RCS Corriere della Sera, the Feltrinelli Foundation, Sinistra Italiana, the Castle of Rivoli, Expo 2015, the Venice Biennale, the European Union, GS1 Italy, Loescher and Slowear. The structure also include Luft, a think tank established to develop creative thinking and collaborative production, which operates primarily in the fields of identity, research, concept, strategy, art direction and narration.

M&C Saatchi’s Italian office opened in Milan in 2010 as an entrepreneurial start-up of five professionals with consolidated experience. Carlo Noseda, Managing Partner, Vincenzo Gasbarro and Luca Scotto di Carlo, both Creative Partners, Silvio Meazza, Interactive Partner, and Jonathan Grundy, who together decided to create a “silo-free space” for creativity. M&C Saatchi Worldwide is a network unlike any other: its 24 agencies in 17 different countries together form a continuously-expanding network that was first established by 1995 by the brothers Maurice and Charles Saatchi, when they left Saatchi & Saatchi, the agency they first set up in 1970. M&C Saatchi immediately took the form of an international network with offices in UK, United States and Australia. Ever since the very beginning, the driving force has been the strategy of simplicity, both in the campaigns it has conceived for many of the world’s leading brands, whose hallmark is their originality and ability to hit the target, and in the network’s organisational structure, designed to be agile and devoid of bureaucratic bottlenecks.

In 1997, three leading names in Italian advertising, Maurizio D’Adda, Riccardo Lorenzini and Gianpietro Vigorelli, decided to pool their resources to create an agency, laying the foundations for an adventure that still continues to this day. When their agency merged with BBDO Italy in 2000, the result was DLV BBDO, bringing on board a strong international spirit and a host of new talents. The way that this agency sees things, being contemporary implies being aware about change before it happens, so not just constantly chasing after it once it has taken place. DLV BBDO formula envisages generating strategic and creative work to underpin the positioning of client brands, employing contents that are always conceived from the very beginning in terms of a multi-platform and multi-device mindset. DLV BBDO has two locations, one in Milan and the other in Rome, where it can draw on the skills of a team of more than 100 professionals. The agency’s passion for a job well done has not changed a bit since 1997, as its website recites: “We are an agency capable of generating ideas as a team. A team made of people, talents and big hearts.”

Ogilvy & Mather Italy is the Italian agency of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide (Group), one of the world’s leading communication networks, with more than 500 offices in 130 countries. First established in Italy in 1962, the agency operates through a series of highly specialised structures: Ogilvy & Mather Advertising covers branding and advertising; OgilvyOne is responsible for digital and customer engagement; Soho Square looks after Continuous Commerce and digital consulting; Ogilvy DeLuxe covers fashion, luxury and lifestyle; Social@Ogilvy looks after social media marketing and communication; Neo@Ogilvy is the place for digital media; Geometry Global covers brand activation; Ogilvy Healthworld is responsible for communication in the area of health and fitness; H&O covers creative production and implementation marketing; Ogilvy Change is responsible for behavioural sciences, and Aida Partners Ogilvy PR is the public relations office. All these different fields of expertise cohabit and interact to meet contemporary challenges. The group was named Network of the Year at the Cannes Lions from 2012 to 2016 and EFFIE Global Index Network of the Year in 2012, 2013 and 2016.

The Grey Global Group is a global advertising and marketing agency based in New York with 432 offices in 154 cities in 96 countries, belonging to the communication holding group WWP. Inside this structure, independent business units deal with advertising, direct marketing, public relations, brand development, customer relationship management and interactive marketing. With its proud slogan “Famously Effective Since 1917”, Grey is capable of opening up new horizons for its clients’ brands through any kind of platform, creating lasting relationships with consumers and giving the brands a real life of their own outside the confines of paid spaces. Grey works with about one in five of all Fortune 500 firms and was named Adweek’s Global Agency of the Year in 2013 and Advertising Age’s Agency of the Year in 2014. Grey United, the group’s Italian branch, was established in 2014 when 1861 United merged with Grey Italy and immediately achieved a market positioning as a strong agency with clear ideas, projected towards the future and with clients of the calibre of Sky, Vodafone, Findus, Amplifon and Galbusera.

Havas is one of the world’s largest global communication groups. Established in Paris in 1835, it employs more than 20,000 people in over 100 countries worldwide. The group is committed to being the best in the world at forging significant links between people and brands by using creativity, media and innovation. Havas is also the most integrated group in its field, since it has implemented its Together Strategy, creative teams and media that operate in shared spaces, the Havas Villages, that are designed to increase synergies and creativity to benefit clients and agencies themselves. Havas is organised in two divisions: Havas Creative Group and Havas Media Group. Havas Creative Group includes the Havas Worldwide Network, present in 75 countries, the Arnold micro-network, present in 9 countries, and numerous top agencies, including BETC and the Fullsix Group. The Havas Media Group encompasses three major brands: Havas Media, Arena Media and Fullsix Media, which operate in synergy with Havas Sports & Entertainment, the most extensive network of experts in sports, music and entertainment.

TBWA\Italia is part of the TBWA\Worldwide network, one of the world’s top ten communication networks and owner of the Disruption® method, whose purpose is to develop business ideas that break with past conventions, a tool for change that doubles as both a working methodology and a philosophy of life. The TBWA\ network includes Auditoire, BEING, Digital Arts Network (DAN), eg+ Worldwide, the Integer® group, TBWA\Media Arts Lab and TBWA\WorldHealth, as well as local and independent TBWA\, with 323 offices in 97 countries and more than 11,100 employees worldwide. TBWA\ has had a presence in Italy since 1971 and now has offices in Milan and Rome, employing more than 100 professionals who work together, sharing their objectives, offices and creative direction, although they all have their own individual and specific areas of expertise. The two Italian agencies cover the areas of interactive digital advertising, events, promotions, retail marketing, co-marketing, print production, video production and the web. The Milan agency has its own in-house daycare that is also open to other children living locally.

Using the digital_enabler® method, Alkemy is capable of accompanying firms through the rapid transformations that are triggered by digital ecosystems, with the declared aim of making a substantial contribution to business growth. Alkemy helps firms evolve, bringing them up to par with technologies and new forms of consumer behaviour, while at the same time ensuring a correct integration between digital areas and traditional processes. Alkemy has gathered together the best skills now available on the market, adding the business of excellence to the leading areas of digital technology: advisory, e-commerce, creativity & brand strategy, content, social, UX & design, digital transformation, media & performance and technology. The management team combines traditional skills in marketing, communication, strategy and transformation processes with the know-how specific to the digital scene. With its subsidiaries SeoLab, BizUp and Alkemy Tech, Alkemy now numbers nearly 300 professionals with a turnover of 40 million.

Andrei Amado was born in Colombia in 1984 to Russian, Colombian parents. He spent his early childhood in Colombia and moved to Berlin aged eleven. After getting a Bachelor degree at the french fashion school Esmod Berlin and Art studies in Antwerp he completed his Master Degree in Fashion Design Womenswear at Central Saint Martins school of Arts and Design in London. Amado has worked for the Max Mara Main Line and Salvatore Ferragamo in Italy.

Class of 1981, Christian Pellizzari was already aware of his vocation as a child: he knew that his destiny was to be a fashion designer. After completing high school, he moved to Florence to attend the Polimoda institute, where he took a diploma as a fashion designer with a specialisation in pattern making. Returning to Italy after a six-month internship in London, he worked with Tonello, flanking the founder in making patterns and creating samples: it was here that Christian started cultivating a real passion for outerwear. 2006 was then the year when he turned over a new leaf: he moved to Paris to work with Vionnet for a year. In 2007, he joined Jay Ahr as creative director, remaining there until 2010. In 2011, he presented his first capsule collection in a small venue in the vicinity of Colette. In 2013, he reached the finals of the competition Who is on Next?, promoted by Vogue Italia, and in 2014 was chosen by Giorgio Armani as an up-and-coming hopeful of Italian fashion to show his proposals for women’s wear in a show at the Armani Theatre. In 2015, he was a finalist in the prestigious international Woolmark Prize competition for young talents.

Born in Germany in 1981 to Italian parents, Andrea Diletto is a leading figure in international bespoke tailoring. From 1999 to 2002, he studied at the B. Kehrer Fashion School in Stuttgart. Since he has always taken a passionate interest in bespoke tailoring, he then decided to develop on his knowledge of craft techniques, and he enrolled in 2006 enrolling in a specialisation apprenticeship with the tailor A. Caraceni in 2006. In 2011, he opened his own tailoring workshop in Milan, Sartoria Diletto, whose hallmark is a blend of tradition, craftsmanship, uniqueness, innovation and research. In 2015, he partnered with Candiani Denim to win top place on the podium at the Global Denim Awards, piecing together a haute couture project around denim and so enabling the excellence and inventiveness of Made in Italy to triumph. Flanked by one of the youngest teams of professionals in the sector, he has succeeded in building up an international reputation and ensuring that his luxury products feature in the wardrobes of all the best-known and most admired gentlemen.

Born and raised in Florence, Marco Panconesi took his diploma in Fashion Design from the city’s Istituto Polimoda. Already passionately interested in art and craftsmanship as a child, he started working as a craftsman in the CRAAFT experimental workshop, where he learned to develop a variety of techniques used in leather goods and clothing by the most prestigious international haute couture brands. After graduating, he moved to Paris and started working as a designer with Givenchy in the jewellery department, under the guidance of Riccardo Tisci, where he completed his training in accessories design. He is currently Director of the Men’s Leather Goods and Accessories Division at Balenciaga and head jewellery designer for the women’s collection, while also working as a consultant for such fashion brands as Mulberry, which builds value on the great British tradition of craftsmanship and manufacturing. He is also a member of the Cargocollective, with which he has taken part in exhibitions in Fiesole and Florence.

Brais Vilasó is a fashion editor, spending his time between Paris and Milan. Creating waves by forging ahead allowing new talent to express themselves in the contemporary fashion world, Brais aims to focus on the power of fashion and all the things that have yet to be done. With a particular interest for menswear, he styles and consults for different brands and publications.

Julia Kim is a menswear designer in the luxury sector. She was born in Germany to Korean parents. Her multicultural background draw her to one of the most prestigious and international fashion schools: The Royal Academy of fine arts in Antwerp. Under the direction of Walter van Beirendonck she developed her passion for menswear design. During her master year she caught the attention of the design team of Versace and was offered to join the menswear team for the first line of Versace after graduation in 2009. After several years of this beautiful and highly creative experience in Milan, she moved on to become a senior designer at Salvatore Ferragamo in Florence. Working under the creative direction of Massimiliano Giornetti and alongside true Italian artisans of the industries, she continued to deepen her knowledge in menswear. Having a strong connection to Milan she decided to move back to Milan in 2016 where she worked at Bottega Veneta as RTW studio manager under the direction of Tomas Maier. This experience lead her to become head designer of OAMC. Her creativity roots from her deep knowledge of the industry and her multicultural background and environment. Currently she works as a consultant and is in involved in academic work.

Born 1983 on the north coast of Germany Sabrina Klaziena Fischer followed a technical fashion design training in the south of Germany, awarded with a scholarship of the federal country of Baden-Württemberg she went to Antwerp to be educated at the Fashion Department of the Royal Academy of fine Arts Antwerp. While studying Sabrina worked already intensively with Haider Ackermann in his Antwerp based Studio. She came in touch with many Antwerp based design houses, like Dries van Noten, Ann Demeulemeester, AF Vandevorst and Christian Wijnants. Christian, him self professor for knitwear at the Royal Academy, asked her to become his Creative Assistant. She gained deep knowledge in material research, draping and tailoring. Frequent work periods in Paris, Tokyo and Brussels took place with her passion for fashion performances for Yiuma Nakazato and Liebeskind Berlin. Sabrina returned to Germany in 2014 consulting for Hugo Boss where she worked with Jason Wu. Currently she’s working with Costas Murkudis for his first debut at the Munich based brand Strenesse.

Raised in the art world, he opened the Ca 'Di Fra' Gallery in Milan in 1997 with his father and sisters. In 2009 in Milan, with Vincenzo Maccarone, he founded the mc2gallery of which he is Art Director. Curator and private consultant for collectors, he is a talent scout for young photographers and organizes exhibitions of young Italian and foreign photographers of international renown - such as Antoine D'Agata, Jacob Aue Sobol, Michael Ackerman - in public spaces, photography festivals, italian galleries and international photography centers. He is Folio Reviewer in photography festivals such as the Vogue Photo Festival in Milan, the PhotoLux Festival in Lucca or Fotografia Europea in Reggio Emilia, The European Photographic Festival in Busto Arsizio and Les Rencontres d'Arles in France. In 2016 he founded Periscope Photoscouting, an online consulting platform for emerging photographers or artists who use the photographic medium.

He works on long term independent project using photography and video. Member of VII photo Agency in NYC, he has devoted himself to the study of social issues, exploring the relation between power and individuals, to give voice to the fragility of human nature. Over the course of his career, he has covered conflicts in Afghanistan, Kosovo, East Timor, Kashmir, Palestine, Sierra Leone, Democratic Republic of Congo, Lebanon, Colombia, Somalia, Southern Sudan , Egypt, Lybia and Syria. He was based in Iraq from January 2003 (three months prior to the invasion of Baghdad) until the end of 2008 as a contributor to Time Magazine. His works have brought him numerous awards. He regularly contributes for leading publications all over the world, and his projects have been presented as installations, exhibitions and screenings at festivals and galleries worldwide He is engaged with educational activities, regularly lecturing at universities and teaching workshops internationally. In 2012 Franco’s film for MSF was nominated for an Emmy Award together with other VII photographers. A Documentary regarding his work in Iraq, Shooting War, was screened in April 2017 at the Tribeca Film Festival in NYC.

Graduated in Philosophy from the University of Bologna. Since 2000, through photography and video, her research has been moving on a fine line between imagination and reality, where the subject always establishes a relation with the natural elements and, at the same time, attempts to transcend the limits of the body and the mind. She often uses scale models to recreate real or imaginary places, which are then illuminated and photographed in her studio (as in the project The cities of thought). In recent years her research has focused on exploring the Italian landscape, with the publication of The third Venice and Atlas Italiae. Alongside the artistic career, she has dedicated her time also to the education activity and, for the past ten years, she has been leading the Conversation around photography, a series of talks with photographers and critics about contemporary photography.

A former journalist, Philippe Séclier has a passion for photography in all its forms. Art director for the daily Le Parisien in 2000, he became a freelancer in 2001 and published four books: Hôtel Puerto (2001), a long analysis on worldwide harbours, La longue route de sable (2005), following in the footsteps of the author and director Pier Paolo Pasolini, El camino de Tulahuèn (2014), following in the footsteps of the Chilean photographer Sergio Larrain and La jeune fille à la fleur (2017), a study on the famous photography of the French photographer Marc Riboud. He was director of two documentaries: one dedicated to Marc Riboud (2004), Instants d'année; the second, Un voyage américain (2009), inspired by Robert Frank’s book The Americans. He took part in the 60th anniversary of Magnum Photos in 2007 and has collaborated with the French photographer and director Raymond Depardon for fifteen years. He is also a curator: Autophoto was presented at the Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain in Paris in 2017 and Depardon USA at the Rencontres internationales de la Photographie d'Arles in Summer 2018.

Academically trained as sinologist and professionally as photographer, he is an artist and author. He runs the publishing house Rorhof with his brother Michele, regularly teaches about photography and his art practice and occasionally curates exhibitions. He studied Oriental languages in Venice and Beijing and completed several international internships, scholarships and residencies, including in institutions such as Magnum Photos (Paris, 2007), Fabrica (Treviso, 2008), Bevilacqua la Masa Foundation (Venezia, 2009) and Rijksakademie in Amsterdam (2018). His work has been extensively exhibited in galleries and museums, while his books were awarded numerous prizes, such as at the Author Book Award (2014) and the Historical Book Award (2018) in Arles, the First Book Award at Paris Photo (2014), Gold at the German Photobooks (2014) and the Premio Bastianelli in Rome (2018).

She is an American-born curator and writer based in Paris who has been working at at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris for the past fifteen years. There, she has curated or produced exhibitions on a wide ranger of artists and photographers including Bruce Davidson, Jacques Henri Lartigue, William Klein, Jim Dine, Bernard Plossu, David Lynch, Martin Parr, Elliott Erwitt, Irving Penn, Sarah Moon and Don McCullin; as well as conserving the museum’s collection of artists’ videos. She is also an art writer who has been the longtime Paris correspondent for ARTnews magazine and has also written on photography and contemporary art for catalogs and magazines such as Art & Auction, Arts, frieze, Metropolis, Connaissance des arts, artpress and Art in Print.

Bossan has been managing complex editorial projects for years, discovering young talents and guiding them in creative research. A photoreporter, his works have been published on top international magazines. He is the author of about ten photography books (among which are Pechino-Parigi, sulla strada con l’Italia, 1989; Exit, 1992 with Roberto Koch; Esodo, 2000, on terminally ill AIDS patients; èAfrica, 2003). Exhibition organiser and curator, in 2011 in New York he directed the Festival Hope Between Dream and Reality with Elisabeth Biondi. He has been a communication consultant of Medici con l’Africa Cuamm since 1998. Member of the faculty of Fabrica as head of the Department of Photography since 2005, since 2006 he is the editor in chief of Colors magazine and since January 2014 he has been in charge of the Editorial area. For Fabrica he has designed the FFF award, curated the exhibition 6x6 Women, staged a performance with the installation of Erik Ravelo’s Peace Dove in Tripoli. Since 2014 he has edited a series of books for Fabrica, as well as the multimedia projects Sciabica and Lok Sabha. He is also the editor of the collection of books Up to now, Fabrica Photography. Project leader of Imago Mundi and of the new exhibition space Gallerie delle Prigioni in Treviso, he has been a professor of Photography at the University of Padua and in various Master’s courses.

Professional full-time photographer since 2010, he focuses his work on the balances of power in the Middle East in the wake of western intervention, as well as its consequences on the civilian population. He has followed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Yemen’s rapid decline in 2010 and the Arab Spring. His first works were published by Time, L’Espresso, and Internazionale. 
In 2011, he joined Contrasto, a major Italian photographic agency. In 2015, he became a nominee member of Magnum Photos. He lived in the Middle East from 2012 to 2014, dedicating himself to long-term projects regarding the aftermath of the fall of Gaddafi in Libya, the conflict in Syria, and its spillover into Lebanon. Since 2014 he has covered the war against the Islamic State in Libya, Syria, and Iraq. His work has been exhibited in Italian and international festivals such as the Venice Biennale, Visa pour L’Image, Les Rencontres d’Arles, Boutographies and Fotoleggendo; and it has been featured in prominent international publications such as The Telegraph, Time, Le Figaro, Vanity Fair, Internazionale, L’Espresso, la Repubblica.

Class of 1966, Erik Kessels was born in the Dutch town of Roermond, near the Belgian border. He started his career working as an illustrator with Ogilvy & Mather Eindhoven and attending evening classes at the Academy of Fine Arts, then continued at the Kuipers & Schouten and the Chiat/Day agencies, the latter in London. In 1996, he and his creative partner John Kramer founded the agency KesselsKramer in Amsterdam, which now has a successful international reputation. In addition to his advertising profession, Kessels is passionate about photography, as a collector, curator, book publisher and magazine editor. His installation at the FOAM in Amsterdam made an unforgettable mark: invited to imagine an exhibition about the future of photography, he came up with the idea of materialising the horrendous flood of images that washes over us every day, showing a million images of all kinds and origins loaded onto Flickr in the course of just one day.

Established in 1997 by Setsu and Shinobu Ito, the Studio Ito works in the areas of architectural, interior, space, product, industrial and packaging design. One of the characteristics of this office is its ability to partner with international architects and designers who specialise in specific areas. Setsu Ito graduated from the University of Tsukuba and learned the profession working with Alessandro Mendini and Angelo Mangiarotti at Alchimia. Shinobu Ito graduated from the Tama Art University in Tokyo and has worked with CBS Sony. The office has won numerous international design awards, including the ADI Compasso d’Oro Award in 2011 and the IF Design Award in 2015. Many of the designs created by the office now feature in the most prestigious permanent collections, including the Triennale Design Museum in Milan and the Neue Sammlung International Design Museum in Munich Monaco. The two architects have held courses and workshops at the Polytechnic in Milan, the IUAV University in Venice, and the University of Tsukuba.

Born in Tokyo in 1938, Makio Hasuike graduated in Industrial Design from the Tokyo University of the Arts in 1962, then spent one year gaining professional experience at home in Japan before moving to Italy. In 1968, he founded his own industrial design office in Milan, one of the first in Italy. In 1982, he embarked on the experimental MH Way project, with which he has launched a series of innovative products onto the market. In the course of some forty years, he has developed design projects and partnered with great Italian and foreign firms, contributing to their success with design solutions that stand out for their innovative aesthetics and contents. His designs have won several prestigious awards and acknowledgements and continue to be shown in exhibitions and museums, including the MoMA in New York. In 2016, he received the ADI Compasso d’Oro Career Award. He is a member of the Founding Committee of the Masters in Strategic Design at Milan Polytechnic.

After working in research and development in the aeronautics industry, Yossef Schvetz studied Industrial Design at the Holon School of Design in Israel. This led him to start working as a designer and theatre designer and in 1996 he was one of the co-founders of Nekuda DM, one of the leading industrial design offices in Tel Aviv. At the same time he also lectured at the Vital & Shenkar Schools of Design, conducting his courses with an experimental methodology of user-centred ethnographic research. In 2000, he moved to Italy to attend a Masters course, which he then followed up with a long career with Flex (previously Flextronics), the world’s largest company operating in the field of services for electronic manufacturing, where he worked with such clients as Nokia, Ericsson, HP and Johnson & Johnson. In 2004, he was one of the founders of the Milan-based studio Frog Design. In 2010, he went back to Flex as Design Manager, expanding the division’s scope of activities to encompass holistic user experience and related field research, as well as innovation in the area of wearable technologies.

Jozeph Forakis is the creator of some of the most iconic product designs of the last twenty years, such as the Havana lamp for Foscarini, now in the permanent collection at the MoMA in New York, the Mouseman Pro mouse, the first to adopt a vertical ergonomic concept and a thumb button, and the Swatch Irony Scuba 200 watch. Forakis is recognised for his innovative use of materials and his interest in interactive technologies. Born to his calling, his designs reflect his family background in the arts and theatre, in particular his experience as a theatre stage and lighting designer in New York. From 1999 to 2002, he was Design Director with Motorola, leading the team that designed the V 70 mobile telephone. The Joseph Forakis studio has offices in Milan and New York and works for such international clients as Epson, Fujitsu, Haier, Kikkerland, Normann Copenhagen, LG Electronics, Magis, Samsung, Swarovski, Tecno and Yamaha Motors. In 2004 ADI, the Italian Association for Industrial Design, dedicated a one-man show to him in Rome and New York, the first it had ever organised for an individual designer.

Zooi Lab is the modeling laboratory founded and directed by Mindert De Koningh. Mindert De Koningh was born in Haarlem, in the Netherlands, in 1958 and started working as a model maker after completing his studies. Working side by side with young Dutch designers sharpened his interest in everything related to industrial design, in due course leading to his decision to move to Milan in 1990. Meanwhile, in 1997, he founded Zooi and opened a workshop in via Savona. He attended both on teaching activities and on the production of prototypes for the students reading for Masters degrees in Industrial Design and in Fashion Design, his path crossing with those of many of the great names that animated the Milan design and art scenes. His work can be classified under two major headings: prototyping and building models and mock-ups for designers, firms and agencies working in all sorts of different industrial sectors; and consultancy and technical support services for artists in executing their works.

Studio Gecchelin was funded by Bruno Gecchelin in 1976. Lorenzo Gecchelin, after obtaining a degree in architecture at the Politecnico di Milano, embarked on a professional experience outside Italy and then joined his family’s design firm in 1997 as an associate. Gecchelin currently manages the firm. He has collaborated with various national and international brands, such as: IGuzzini illuminazione, Ivela, Reggiani, Raat, Kelvin Italy, Aermec Sierra, and Whirlpool. In 2002, he won the ADI Compasso d’Oro for the Latina citrus juicer produced by Fratelli Guzzini. His background as an architect and his strong interest in all aspects of creativity and technology have granted him a multi-disciplinary view that ranges from interior to graphic design, from photography to illustration. He matured teaching experiences in various institutions in Milan (among which are the Politecnico di Milano and IED) before joining the RM faculty.

I have always been looking for a design that gives light to architectures. With firms of the sector, as a lighting designer and creative director, I develop the creative project and harmonize it with the industrial process, to create in glass and light. During my working experience I practiced architecture, graphics, interior design and industrial design. What thrilled me the most was glass and lighting. A real revelation that brought me to learn how to elaborate, design and invent with glass and light. I graduated from the Venice Institute of Architecture. I continued the studies at the Polytehnic University of Milan where I learned the design aspects of lighting. From that moment my goal has become the pursuit of efficiency of light, as a result of the beauty of the industrial product. Therefore I learned how to use production and engineering at their best for industrial decorative lamps.

Born in Caracas in 1957 to Italian parents, Giulio Vinaccia moved to Italy in 1985 and spent the years from 1997 to 2012 working with his brother Valerio in the area of industrial design, while also starting to take an interest in social design in his native Colombia in 1993. From 1996 to 2002, he worked with SEBRAE, the Brazilian Support Service for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises, developing a dozen projects of design for craftsmanship in several communities of Brazil. In 2004, the Spanish government commissioned him to carry out a project to study the iconography of the Camino de Santiago. He subsequently worked to flank communities in critical condition in Sweden, Canada, Afghanistan and Egypt. Since 2009, he has been working with the development programmes at the UNIDO – United Nations Industrial Development Organisation – in China, Haiti and the five Caribbean states, Pakistan, Madagascar and seven southern Mediterranean countries. In 2015, he won the World Green Design Contribution Award and in 2016, together with UNIDO, the ADI Compasso d’Oro Award, the first one every presented in the award’s history to the category of social design.

A graduate of the IED(European Institute of Design) in Turin in 2001, obtained his Masters in Transportation-Interface Design at the IED in Madrid an Turin in 2002. He has collaborated with numerous companies and design studios including Pininfarina, Ferrari, Motorola, Fizik, Frog Design and Flextronics. Since 2006 he has been teaching at the IED in Turin and Milan. In 2011 he opened his own design studio which is involeved in Product and Transportation Design.

NODE is a Berlin- and Oslo-based design studio founded in 2003 by Anders Hofgaard and Serge Rompza. The studio works collaboratively across various media, focusing on editorial, identity, exhibition and interactive projects, in close relationship with clients, ranging from individuals to mostly cultural institutions. Recent projects include the new website for Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA); the identity for HKW Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin; the Center for Advanced Visual Studies Special Collection (CAVS) website for MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT); and the design for the Lithuanian pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia.

“We believe brands are like people: they will stand out through their unique personalities and attitudes.” Base is a leading international branding firm led by creatives based in New York, Brussels and Geneva. Base's work lives at the intersection of business and culture, with a client roster that includes renowned cultural institutions, corporations, fashion houses, media companies, colleges, celebrities, cities and many more.

Hort emerged from the Frankfurt techno scene in 1994, originally founded by Eike König as "Eikes grafischer Hort". The studio moved to Berlin in 2007 and has been growing as a group ever since. Hort does art direction, branding, creative consultancy, editorial design, graphic design, illustration, lectures and workshops. Hort works with institutions such as Arte, Bauhaus Dessau, Bergen Assembly, Mousonturm, Frankfurter Positionen and Tanzplattform Deutschland, as well as brands like Adobe, IBM, Microsoft, Nike, The New York Times and Universal Music. People working at Hort are Anne Büttner, Eike König, Elizabeth Legate, Tim Rehm, Tim Schmitt, Tim Sürken and Alan Woo, together with other freelancers and interns.

G Design was established in Athens by the designers Michalis Georgiou and Dimitris Stefanidis to work in a fieldthat encompasses a host of disciplines, from brand identity and packaging to strategic design and digital experience. The studio perceives every project as an opportunity for everybody involved in the creative process to be enriched with learning. The impression made by their design work can be summarised as the concepts of clarity, authenticity and emotive resonance. In the vision adopted by the G Design Studio, the same degree of importance is attributed to new technologies and practical skills. The aim is to produce design that is rich with meaning, capable of sparking our imagination and of producing lasting effects. Michalis Georgiou holds a diploma from the London College of Printing and is Graphic Design Pathway Leader at the Vakalo College of Art and Design, where he has lectured for more than twenty years. Dimitris Stefanidis was educated in London, Athens and the Pratt Institute in New York. He has worked with Pentagram New York and FutureBrand in London and currently lectures in Branding at the Vakalo College.

The Studio FM Milano was founded in 1996 by Barbara Forni and Sergio Menichelli, who were joined by Cristiano Bottino in 2000. The office specialises in graphic design, with a special focus on art direction, co-ordinated image, publishing graphics, exhibition design, signage and web design, working for both commercial clients in fashion, design, architecture, industry, the service sector and culture, and in partnership with public-sector institutions. The office has received important acknowledgements for its work, including an Honourable Mention at the ADI Compasso d’Oro in 2001 and the European Design Awards, which it won every year from 2008 to 2015. Among its clients are such names as Brioni, Bticino, Cassina, Coop Italia, the City of Milan, the City of Rome, Electrolux, Ermenegildo Zegna, Expo Milano 2015, Expo Zaragoza, Fantini Rubinetterie, the Massimo De Carlo Gallery, Gianfranco Ferré, Hachette Rusconi Editori, MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MUDEC Milan Museum of Cultures, the Cinisello Balsamo Museum of Contemporary Photography, NDIA Doha New International Airport, Poltrona Frau, Saipem and Tecno.

Landor was established in 1941 by Walter Landor, who in 1964 transferred the main office on board the ferryboat Klamath in San Francisco Bay, where it soon became a magnet for creativity, attracting visits from people like Andy Warhol, Tom Wolfe, Issey Miyake and Marshall McLuhan. At that time, the agency pioneered many of the research approaches, solutions and methods that have now become standard for branding. Landor is now an agency with 29 offices in 21 countries worldwide that work to partner with top global brands, including Aeroflot, Bayer, BBC, BMP, BP, Citroën, Danone, Etihad Airways, the International Hotels Group, Procter & Gamble, the Russian Copper Company and the Tata Group. The agency offers a wide range of services, from strategy, positioning, corporate identity and brand architecture to prototyping, naming, verbal identity, environments, experiences and engagement, interactive and media design. Landor is part of the Young & Rubicam Group, which belongs to the holding company WPP, the world’s largest marketing and communication concern.

Founded in Milan in 1997 by Andrea Bacaloni, Francesco Cavalli, Bruno Genovese and David Pasquali, Leftloft is an independent design office where ideas, people and skills are encouraged to flow together and merge to develop a broader vision of design, of culture and of communication. In 2009, Leftloft also opened an office in New York. The office operates with a design team in which each individual is specialised in several fields, from branding to web design. Leftloft has put its name to many projects in Italy and across the world, partnering with some of the most important private-sector businesses and public-sector institutions in Italy and elsewhere, such as the Inter football club, Mondadori, the Milan Triennale, dOCUMENTA (3), Cassina, Colmar, Pirelli Hangar-Bicocca, subito.it, the Istanbul Biennale, RCS Corriere della Sera, the Feltrinelli Foundation, Sinistra Italiana, the Castle of Rivoli, Expo 2015, the Venice Biennale, the European Union, GS1 Italy, Loescher and Slowear. The structure also include Luft, a think tank established to develop creative thinking and collaborative production, which operates primarily in the fields of identity, research, concept, strategy, art direction and narration.

Pentagram was founded in 1972 in Needham Road, London, by a group of friends – Alan Fletcher, Theo Crosby, Colin Forbes, Kenneth Grange and Mervyn Kurlansky – and is now one of the world’s largest independent graphic design consultancies, led by the 21 partners, all of whom are leaders in their individual fields. With offices in London, New York, San Francisco, Berlin and Austin, Pentagram can design anything: architecture, interiors, products, identities, advertising, publications, posters, books, infographics, exhibitions, websites, and digital installations. Each client works directly with one or more of the partners, in an organisation that reflects the office’s conviction that great design cannot happen without passion, intelligence, and personal commitment, which is demonstrated by a portfolio of work that spans five decades. In 1999, Pentagram was included in the Thames and Hudson Dictionary of Graphic Design and Designers of the Twentieth Century.

For over 25 years, Lava has been exploring the boundaries of the creative field, driven by a unique approach to communication concept development. With their Lava Lab, they challenge clients - and themselves - to experiment and research new insights and new opportunities in design, storytelling and technology. Lava has offices in Amsterdam and Beijing.

With a slogan that reads “Design that counts”, Raffinerie was founded in Zürich in 2000 and is led by three creative directors: Reto Ehrbar, Christian Hass and Nenad Kovačić. The task they have given themselves is to “create smart design solutions for organisations, firms, start-ups and everyone else”, providing a comprehensive package of support and consultancy services related to graphic design that range from art direction and corporate design to publication design and illustration, based on a mindset that goes “from print to web, or wherever our ideas might take us”. Raffinerie now employs an in-house team of 15 designers, who follow every project with curiosity and dedication, from the general outline idea to the tiniest detail. In 2016, the office won a double award at the tenth edition of the European Design Awards held in Vienna: Agency of the Year and Best of Show. This was the first time in the history of the EDA that one office has come away with the two leading awards, while also winning the Best of Show for the second time.

Born in Trento in 1962, Cesare Maria Cunaccia graduated in Architecture with a focus on history from the IUAV University in Venice, then in Literature with an artistic focus from the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, before taking a PhD at the Sorbonne in Paris, investigating mannerist culture and artistic relationships between Italy and Fontainebleau in the era of the last kings of the Valois dynasty. He has authored a substantial number of books about the Italian and European artistic and environmental heritage, the history of fashion, photography and the contemporary semantics of fashion and has curated numerous exhibitions, including the Fashion and Photography section of La Danza delle Avanguardie, at the MART in Rovereto in 2004, together with Franca Sozzani. An outstanding feature of his journalism is his longstanding work with Vogue Italia and l’Uomo Voguemagazines, both of which he served for several years as Editor-at-large, and with AD Italia as Art and Antiques Consultant. He currently contributes to Il Giornale and Giornale Stile and is Senior Editor with Lampoon. He lectures in two Masters courses in fashion and communication at the LUISS University in Rome.

After his studies at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, he started producing images that combined classical techniques with modern digital tools. The study of the “sign” allowed him to operate in various fields in communication: he has illustrated monographic books for publishing houses, self-help manuals for De Agostini, and illustrated catalogues for Sharai. Since 2016, he has been collaborating with Mediaset as a visualizer in the creation of storyboards. At the same time, he collaborates with several advertising agencies and publishes his own underground comic books. In 2017, he met Francesco Vezzoli – a meeting which catapulted him into the world of contemporary art as he lent his hand to the artist in the performance “Take my tears” within the itinerating collective performance “Take me I’m yours” staged in the Pirelli Hangar Bicocca in Milan and repeated in 2018 in Villa Medici in Rome.

Ph.D. in History of European Society, she teaches “Fashion history and documentation” and “Fashion publishing and communication” at the Università degli Studi di Milano. Apart from her expertise in the history of fashion and dress, Canella is also an expert on the history of the city and the territory. Editor of various collections of books and conferences, she also collaborated with many brands in managing their historical archives and enhancing their heritage: Biki, Jole Veneziani, Germana Marucelli, sartoria Franco, Curiel, Giorgio Correggiari, Fiorucci, Missoni, Italo Sport, Sergio Tacchini, conceria Stefania, Andrea Pfister, Calzoleria Rivolta, Sutor Mantellassi, Ferragamo, Barbara Vitti, Pia Soli, Associazione Italiana Pellicceria, Walter Albini, Alberto Lattuada. Among her more recent publications are: Sport e stile. 150 anni d’immagine al femminile (Sport and style. 150 years of the female image), Skira; Dalla sartoria al prêt-à-porter (From tailoring to prêt-à-porter), in Consumi della vita quotidiana, il Mulino; Sant Ambroeus. Il dolce salotto di Milano (Sant Ambroeus. Milan’s sweet “salotto”), Skira; Franco il sarto dalle linee semplici (Franco the tailor of simple lines), Nexo; lR 100 Rinascente Stories of Innovation, Skira; La rivoluzione nei negozi Fiorucci (Revolution in Fiorucci Stores), in Epoca Fiorucci, Musei dei Venezia.

Chiara Orlandini has lived in between Italy and the United States and travelled all over the world. Her studies in Industrial Design were soon combined with her strong interest in Fashion and she started to work for some of the most interesting fashion manufacturers in the Italian market to then move on to professional experiences in several renowned fashion houses. Her knowledge of Made In Italy products, where she matured a particularly significant experience at Giorgio Armani, is combined with her experience on the American scene, where she held the position of Vice President of Design at Calvin Klein. Although her professional experience began in footwear, her career later extended to the complete world of male and female accessories. Her strong interest for the creative phase in fashion design always goes hand in hand with her high attention towards production processes and material research, as her significant experiences at international industrial companies as well as “hand-made” manufacturing enterprises in Europe, Asia and South America clearly show. In recent years, she has shifted her attention towards new technologies and environmental sustainability. In 2016, she founded Chio Resolutions whose mission it is to offer professional expertise to support innovative and high-quality projects.

Visual and interaction designer, Micchichè graduated in Communication Design at the IUAV in Venice. In 2014, he became part of the digital team of Il Sole 24 Ore, where he worked on developing the company’s digital products. In 2016, he started his collaboration with Circular, a well-known communication agency in Milan, where he developed digital projects for brands like Nike, Acer, Timberland and Benetton. His work combines design and technology placing the user and his interactions at the heart of each project. He currently works as a consultant and freelance designer for various brands and agencies.

After graduating from the Academy of Art in Enschede (Netherlands), he left Holland to go to Italy with the dream of working in a fashion design studio. He started with Walter Albini and was later hired as Luciano Soprani’s assistant where he learned to build a fashion collection and had a chance to broaden his knowledge of high-quality made-in-Italy fabrics working back-to-back with the best textile manufacturers. His encounter with Elisabetta Grossi made him decide to share his professional trajectory and to start an entrepreneurial activity opening his own studio with Elisabetta in Milan. He collaborated for several seasons with the associates of the “Ente Comitato Moda” where he was in charge of developing fabric trends. At the same time, he provided the same type of consultancy, with the addition of accessories (buttons, embroideries, trimmings), for Milano Unica – leading international fair in Italian textile manufacturing – and integrated this activity with collaborations as a fashion designer for several Italian and international companies in the fashion industry (Deni Cler, Gruppo Coin, Antonio Fusco, Isaia).

Christian Boaro studied Fashion design in Milan, where he graduated in Fashion Design at the Istituto Marangoni. In 2004 he stood out as the only Italian finalist in the international contest for young talents, ITS Talent. He debuted in his professional career working for fashion brands like Versace and Dolce & Gabbana and then continued his professional growth working alongside Gianfranco Ferré, where he designed the line Gf Ferré. Later, he moved on to MSGM, where he coordinated the menswear and womenswear lines. In 2012, he was appointed head designer at Ports 1961, where he worked on all the womenswear collections. In 2015, the Cadidl group hired him as Art Director to relaunch the historical French brand Philippe & Gaston. In 2018, the PlasMA in Milan hosted his first photography exhibition of polaroid shots. Boaro currently collaborates as a freelance designer with several fashion companies.

His professional career has given him the chance to gain experience in different fields: from communication to financing service. He has successfully developed a new business and at the same time renewed new commercial networks and company organizations. He has a peculiar attitude towards strategic thinking, from team work to talent honing and management. As a Coach Manager, he is truly a remarkable specialist of relationships for the development and acquisition of fundamental self-awareness. He has had numerous managerial roles in important Italian and international companies ranging from Commercial Manager in Mondadori Advertising to General Manager in Cemit Interactive Media, and he has been the General Manager in Condé Nast. After a few years in consulting, he came back to the company field as a Managing Director and as CEO of Cerved's Finservice Group.

After graduating from Istituto Marangoni in Fashion Design, he started his professional career by collaborating on projects for male and female accessories collections with Italian and international Maisons, such as Costume National, Giorgio Armani, Loewe, Tommy Hilfiger. He is currently collaborating with several companies in the industry and working on the launch of his own line of footwear.

In 1988, Fiorenza Spezzapria opened a studio in Milan for collaborations with Italian and international companies. After graduating from IED in Milan with a specialisation in textile design, she started to collaborate with several companies in the industry, such as Callaghan, Basile, Hettabretz, Comitato Moda Italiano, Luciana Zuffi, Brioni, Five Fox Japan, Yinger Group, Nali International, Milano Unica-Boglioli, etc. Her mission is creating “made-to-measure” projects for her clients, from seasonal trends to collection development, all the way to the final presentation, offering the right balance of creativity, market-knowledge, and new technologies.

A photographer in fashion and advertising, specialised in portraits, he has been collaborating since the beginning of his career with international agencies such as Armando Testa, Leo Burnett, Bcube, JWT, and has worked on projects for important brands in fashion and advertising (Versace, Gianfranco Ferré, Fiat, Nara Camicie, Barcklays, Mattel, Sony Italia, Ferrero, Lego, Volkswagen, San Pellegrino, Pepsi Cola, Red Bull, Alfa Romeo) as well as renowned publishers like L’Officiel India , Condé Nast, Mondadori, Rizzoli, Arbiter. He has published four photography books: Nata per Viaggiar (Born to Travel) (2009) is dedicated to Nara Camicie; About Us (2011), a collection of portraits of 70 international protagonists in the world of custom-made Harley Davidsons. Occhio alla moto (Look out for the bike) (2011) portrays famous Italian people as they had never been seen before; and in Beyond the Chef (2013, edizioni Skira), 35 international starred chefs are portrayed in an ironic and surreal manner. For his work in Beyond the Chef, Rizzotti received the Positive Photography Experience Award at the Positive Business Awards organized in the “Scuola di Palo Alto” in Milan in June 2014. In 2015, he presented the exhibition Shapes in action, where he explored naked female art in large-format works.

Fashion designer, after graduating from a scientific High School, she obtained her diploma as fashion designer and pattern maker at Istituto Marangoni in Milan and immediately started to collaborate with various style and design studios in Italy, until she moved to London in 1995. She continued to work on projects as a freelancer and experimented with her own street and clubbing clothing brand. In the late 1990s, she returned to Italy and collaborated for ten years with the style departments of several renowned Italian and international luxury maisons, among which were Anna Molinari-Bluemarine, Prada and Emilio Pucci. In 2012, she took on the creative direction of Dirk Bikkembergs’ womenswear collection. After this experience, she collaborated with Bally and later moved to Thailand to design the new Rtw womenswear collection for Jim Thompson, a local luxury brand. In 2018, she came back to Italy, where she is currently working on a new project for a Rtw womenswear collection.

A Cambridge graduate, Emilio Foxell obtained a Master’s degree in Oxford and at the Imperial College and completed his Ph.D. at the London Business School. After a professional experience as a consultant, he became a Lecturer in marketing and communication at Oxford University and was later appointed Senior Lecturer at the London University of the Arts. In Italy, he was a Socrates Exchange Professor at IULM University (teaching advertising), as well as an Associate Professor at Università LUISS Guido Carli (teaching fashion marketing and management). He founded his own consultancy firm and carried out several research projects in the fields of product innovation, brand development and semiotics applied to marketing. Foxell has received several awards and acknowledgements for his projects, among which are Oxford University’s Heath Harrison Prize, the Centre for Excellence Award granted by the University of the Arts in London, and the Prize for Best Paper in Retail Marketing awarded by the British Academy of Management. Throughout his academic career, he has directed numerous dissertations on marketing and communication.

Pattern maker manager, Barbieri graduated in 1982 as an industrial pattern maker at CFP in Carpi, Italy. For nine years, he collaborated as a manual and CAD industrial pattern maker at Maska, where he was in charge of the plus-size womenswear lines. Later, he entered the Max Mara group, where he managed the pattern making and tailoring departments for thirteen years and was responsible for some of the first womenswear lines of the brand. He then moved on to an experience as Pattern Maker Manager at Liu Jo and currently holds the same position at Twinset Milano. Throughout his career, he has collaborated as a pattern-making and fashion design teacher with the main fashion institutes in Italy.

He took his first professional steps in some wool studios in the Biella area, a worldwide known district for its excellence in the material. In the 90s, he attended Istituto Marangoni in Milan where, in 1994, he graduated in Fashion Design. After his studies, he worked as a designer in Sergio Tacchini, dealing with the male sportswear collection. There, he had the chance to develop an understanding of how an entire collection is created. His next experience was in Versace where worked for four years, and then he moved to Gianfranco Ferré Style Office where, for seven years, he has dealt with raw materials, both men and women product development. Today, he deals with research and development for Made in Italy collections for Asian companies.

After their artistic studies and respective professional experiences in Valentino Couture and Krizia, they established their partnership in Mila Schön in the 90s, working for almost a decade as consultants, first and creative director, then, dealing with prêt-à-porter and haute couture collections’ design, retail management and advertising. Then, they took on the creative directions of many brands, such as Byblos, Blumarine and Anna Molinari and worked in the Style Office of Gianfranco Ferré, one of the best masters of Made in Italy. Their relationship with the stylist was significant both from a professional and human point of view. They were entrusted with the creative direction of man and woman GFFerrè line. After the premature death of Ferrè, they were appointed brand creative directors. Today, Piaggi and Citron still work as freelancers, collaborating with many companies such as Sobia Rykiel, Les Copains, Genny, Peserico, Cruciani and, more recently, Piazza Sempione.

Born and raised in Genoa, Paolo began his career working for Calvin Klein and Versace. In 2000, he moved to Ermenegildo Zegna where he set up Agnona collections. Then, he worked in Roberto Cavalli Group where he designed female collections. In 2003, he graduated in Fashion Design at the University of Urbino. In the same year, he launched the fashion firm with his namesake and, in the following one, he showed his first collection in Milan. Architecture and design are the key sources of inspiration and reference in his work, with the aim to create timeless fashion. Hence, his collections are inspired by the study of primordial geometrical shapes combined with the human body. The result is a multifunctional fashion, with unusual dynamisms and innovative volumes, which design a new female expression and an innovative idea of sensual and plastic elegancy. Today, he lives between London and Paris, working as luxury brand consultant.

He studied in Florence at the Istituto d’arte di Porta Romana di Firenze, Jewellery Faculty, and at ISIA, where he graduated with a final dissertation on a snowboard joint to which he owes the the Compasso d’oro Giovani Prize he has won. His first professional experiences in fashion led him to work with Ermanno Scervino and La Nouvelle bague, where he worked for 7 years as jewelry designer. In 2000, he set up his freelancer activity, which in the years led him to collaborate continuously with the following companies: Damiani, Cartier, Salvatore Ferragamo, Akris, Celine, Maison Margiela and Jil Sander, dealing with both fashion and jewelry. Curiosity and the observation of the phenomena affecting the esthetic perception are the two element that inspire his style. The fusion between handcraft and technological innovation carry a highly personal poetic key: full spaces contrast the empty ones, movement contrasts what is static, and the esthetic research is in constant evolution.

After the diploma in Shoe Design at Politecnico Calzaturiero del Brenta, he began his fashion career in 2003 working for Giorgio Armani and Giorgio Armani Privé. Then, for eight years, he has worked in Sergio Rossi, a globally relevant shoe brand, where he reinforced his skill set and worked for as Creative Director from 2013 to 2016. Then, he worked for prestigious brands such as Tom Ford and for Made in Italy excellences such as Santoni. Femininity, lightness, eclecticism, sublimation for Italian shoe design and passion for workmanship represent the basic elements for his esthetic research.

He began his fashion career in 1982, after studying in Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, working as freelance textile designer. He focused his interest on textile as a way of artistic expression. He became Art Director of Manera, which during that time, was one of the two biggest textile firms in the world and, hence, a good point of view on taste and style evolution. Under this title, he collaborated with Chanel, Dior and SYL. His textile drawings became part of the fashion history of the last thirty-year period. In his work, he has always had a wide and inclusive approach, collaborating with people external to the sector, like Frank Stella and the newspaper Interior Design. In 1995, he took up a professional partnership with Tom Ford for Gucci. Then, he collaborated with Emilio Pucci in Florence and Calvin Klein in New York. From 2006 to 2009, he was Textile and Accessories Designers for Brioni, Klein and Valentino. He is currently collaborating with Bulgari.

An architect, Franco Achilli trained with Alfred Hohenegger, Giorgio Fioravanti and Gianni Sassi, then at the New York School of Visual Arts. After acting as assistant to Emilio Fioravanti at G&R Associati, he opened his own first office in Milan in 1985 with Guglielmo Ghizzardi and Mario Piazza. In 1995, he launched A+G Achilli Ghizzardi Associati, which he still runs today, working in architecture, brand and exhibition design, and publishing graphics. His clients in a career spanning over thirty years have included industrial and commercial groups, publishers and international organisations. He has continuous experience in lecturing in design schools and teaches Visual Identity in Brands at the IULM University in Milan. He has been a Visiting Professor at the Northern Illinois University and had held courses at the University of Palermo, the Art Institute of Chicago, Milan Polytechnic, the IUAV in Venice and other universities. The acknowledgements he has received for his teaching work include ten awards from the Designer & Art Directors Club of London. He has written and edited publications about design and his work has featured in leading international magazines.

After studying at the High School of Art in Venice, her hometown, she began her educational course in fashion at Istituto Marangoni in Milan. After an experience in Dolce and Gabbana, she has been working for eight years in Prada where she gained international fame as designer. Her next step was in Dior under the art direction of John Galliano. In 2007, she was appointed creative director at Roberta di Camerino, a historical Venetian brand known all over the world for its velvet and colorful bags. In 2009, she set up her consultancy studio and started many collaborations with several brands, among which there is Loewe, under JW Anderson direction, Roger Vivier with Bruno Frisoni, Sergio Rossi, Moncler and many others. In 2013, she took up the direction of Zagliani, a prestigious maison from Milan whose creations are handcraft made. Since 2015, she has been dealing with the leather sector of Bulgari, Italian luxury icon.

Born in Syracuse, in Sicily in 1978, Davide Calluori graduated in Art from the DAMS school in Bologna, then moved to Milan, where he took a diploma in Graphic Design from the Accademia di Comunicazione. He started his professional career at DLV BBDO as an art director. He then developed an interest in creating and producing images for printing. He became the manager for the post-production, 3D and illustration department. At the beginning of 2016, he teamed up with Daniele Tribi and Francesco Van Straten to establish B612Studio, a structure that works with illustration, 3D, post-production and photography. The clients he has completed projects for include Yamaha, Freddy, Cam, Rolling Stone, Wall Street Institute, Che Banca!, Bayer, Telecom, Sky and Audi. His work appeared in the 2012, 2014 and 2016 editions of the 200 Best Digital Artists Worldwide Annual Award and of the 200 Best Illustrators Worldwide Annual Award published by Lürzer’s Archive.

Translator, conference interpreter and professor of English language, she graduated in English Language and Literature at the University of Aarhus and accomplished a research PhD in Theory of Translation at the University of Milan. She has been teaching both in Italian and international universities and in corporate contexts for 15 years. This experience gave her the chance to be able to deal with students from different cultures and educational backgrounds, with the aim to make them reach a good language level for several social and professional operating contexts. Besides, she works as Project Manager for important translation assignments and interpreting projects. She released monographies on language didactics and contributed to numerous academic papers in this field.

Documentary-maker and visual sociologist, Rossano deals with visual sociology and anthropology at the University of Barcelona, where he concluded a Ph.D. in Sociology in 2016. In 2002, he graduated in Law at the Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II and three years later he obtained his Diploma of specialiation in cinema direction at the Centre d’Estudis Cinematografics de Catalunya. In 2006, he attended and concluded the Master’s Course in Management for Showbusiness at the SDA Bocconi in Milan. An expert in video-making and in the organisation of cultural and theatre events, he has worked at the Piccolo Teatro di Milano (2006) and at the Napoli Teatro Festival Italia (2009-2010). Rossano is the author of documentaries that have participated in various international festivals and is an arduous writer of academic articles and short stories. His research activity falls within the disciplinary field of Sociology and Anthropology, in connection with audiovisual methodologies and techniques.

After graduating with full marks from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, Lia Luzzatto continued her studies, exploring the fields of fashion and specialising in hardcopy and digital chromatic communication. She now works as a colour consultant in many fields, writes books, takes part in seminars and teaches. Because of its symbolic, communicative, psychological and sensory complexity, colour is a vital resource in every visual context. Lia Luzzatto lectures in Colour Theory at the Academy of Communication and the Luxury Lab in the Academy of Luxury in Milan. Writing together with Renata Pompas, whom she met attending Luigi Veronesi’s lectures in chromatology at the Academy, she has published numerous books about colour that are constantly going through reprints for publishers including Hoepli, Il Castello and Bompiani. She is a founder member of the Italian Colour Association’s Colour Group and is a member of its Presidency Council and Scientific Committee. Previously a member of the CISST – Italian Centre for Studying the History of Fabrics – and of ADI, she is currently a member of the ECD Environmental Colour Design of Buenos Aires and of the Stockholm-based Colour Study Group.

A journalist and photography critic who writes for the ViviMilano supplement to the leading national daily newspaper Corriere della Sera, Giovanni Pelloso has worked on publishing projects with Mondadori Portfolio (he was the author of the piece dedicated to Mario De Biasi, Giorgio Lotti and Angelo Cozzi), with Hachette and with Canon Italia. A co-author of the Dizionario mondiale della fotografia (Rizzoli/Contrasto, 2002), he is a contributor to the monthly magazines NPhotography and Photo Professional and is editor in chief of the long-established magazine Il Fotografo. He has held workshops and seminars about photography at the Suor Orsola Benincasa University in Naples, the Istituto Italiano di Fotografia and the Contrasto agency. His research interests focus on the theory and practice of the sociology of consumption and of advertising. Working as a contract lecturer, he has been teaching and conducting research since 2005 at the Faculty of Communication Sciences and of Entertainment at the IULM University in Milan. He has been lecturing in photography at the LAO since 2013 and is an associate researcher at the Milan Civic Aquarium.

After his humanistic studies, Vergani trained himself as a scholar while he worked in a record shop. A brief experience in the world of design led him to become Luigi Settembrini and Francesca Sorace’s assistant in the year 2000 during their collaboration with the Cosmit for the exhibition “1951-2001, Made in Italy?”. In 2001, he founded Nowhere, the first example of a nomad exhibition space, and organised exhibitions in Milan, Paris, and Florence with this format. In 2003, he opened a permanent office in Milan, thus giving substance to his research activity in the field of contemporary art. During the same year, and until 2006, he worked as an editorial consultant for Skira. From 2007 to 2013 he was the Vice President of Startmilano, a sectorial association for the diffusion of contemporary art and culture. He has been writing about art for the newspaper Il Giorno/QN since 2009.

Translator, conference interpreter and professor of English language, she graduated in English Language and Literature at the University of Aarhus and accomplished a research PhD in Theory of Translation at the University of Milan. She has been teaching both in Italian and international universities and in corporate contexts for 15 years. This experience gave her the chance to be able to deal with students from different cultures and educational backgrounds, with the aim to make them reach a good language level for several social and professional operating contexts. Besides, she works as Project Manager for important translation assignments and interpreting projects. She released monographies on language didactics and contributed to numerous academic papers in this field.

Born in 1981, Luigi Ciuffreda studied architecture and design at the École Supérieure d’Art et de Design in Orleans and at Milan Polytechnic, where he graduated in 2006 with a specialisation in museography and exhibition design for cultural heritage. From 2005 to 2007, he worked as an expert in the subject in the Interior Design workshops at the Milan Polytechnic Faculty of Design and, from 2013 to 2017, he lectured in design and exhibition design at the Milan Academy of Communication. He now operates in a variety of permutations of the field of design: product design, retail design, interior architecture an exhibition design. His more notable recent projects include the museographical design at the Lapidary Museum of Monte Sant’Angelo and the signage for the new NAS Arena stadium in Dubai. Since 2006, he has been a consultant with Buratti Architects, where he has collaborated on projects for B&B Italia, Fontana Arte, Living Divani, Poliform, Poltrona Frau, Porro, Tecno, Lamborghini, Ducati, Husqvarna, La Perla and Gebrüder Thonet of Vienna. Along with his professional activities, he devotes some of his time to personal research into illustration and graphic design.

After his humanistic studies, Vergani trained himself as a scholar while he worked in a record shop. A brief experience in the world of design led him to become Luigi Settembrini and Francesca Sorace’s assistant in the year 2000 during their collaboration with the Cosmit for the exhibition “1951-2001, Made in Italy?”. In 2001, he founded Nowhere, the first example of a nomad exhibition space, and organised exhibitions in Milan, Paris, and Florence with this format. In 2003, he opened a permanent office in Milan, thus giving substance to his research activity in the field of contemporary art. During the same year, and until 2006, he worked as an editorial consultant for Skira. From 2007 to 2013 he was the Vice President of Startmilano, a sectorial association for the diffusion of contemporary art and culture. He has been writing about art for the newspaper Il Giorno/QN since 2009.

His professional career has given him the chance to gain experience in different fields: from communication to financing service. He has successfully developed a new business and at the same time renewed new commercial networks and company organizations. He has a peculiar attitude towards strategic thinking, from team work to talent honing and management. As a Coach Manager, he is truly a remarkable specialist of relationships for the development and acquisition of fundamental self-awareness. He has had numerous managerial roles in important Italian and international companies ranging from Commercial Manager in Mondadori Advertising to General Manager in Cemit Interactive Media, and he has been the General Manager in Condé Nast. After a few years in consulting, he came back to the company field as a Managing Director and as CEO of Cerved's Finservice Group.

Mindert De Koningh was born in Haarlem, in the Netherlands, in 1958 and started working as a model maker after completing his studies. Working side by side with young Dutch designers sharpened his interest in everything related to industrial design, in due course leading to his decision to move to Milan in 1990. Meanwhile, in 1997, he founded Zooi and opened a workshop in via Savona. He attended both on teaching activities and on the production of prototypes for the students reading for Masters degrees in Industrial Design and in Fashion Design, his path crossing with those of many of the great names that animated the Milan design and art scenes. His work can be classified under two major headings: prototyping and building models and mock-ups for designers, firms and agencies working in all sorts of different industrial sectors; and consultancy and technical support services for artists in executing their works.

A professional journalist, Masini graduated in Italian literature with a specialisation in Art History at the Università degli Studi La Sapienza (Rome). He writes for Quotidiano Nazionale (Il Giorno, il Resto del Carlino, La Nazione) and over the past thirty years he has held various posts in the Group, until becoming the manager of editorial projects. He has a Master’s degree in marketing and communication and another in digital marketing lab, both acquired at the Sole-24 Ore’s Business School. He has taught “Media languages” and “Art Markets” at the Università degli Studi Carlo Bo in Urbino. He was a member of the Board of Directors at Ads and Audipress and a member of the Design Prize scientific committee. He recently published the book Gabriella Crespi, Spirito e Materia, arte e design (Gabriella Crespi, Spirit and Matter, art and design) for Odoya.

Graduated in Psychology at the University of Padua, he is registered in the Register of Psychotherapists in the region of Lombardy. After a second degree in Philosophy, he conducted extensive philosophical research also on oriental cultures. This research effort led to the foundation of the Kuan Institute in 1985, an institute for the diffusion of Chinese Medicine in Italy. He is a member of the American Psychological Association. Already active as a teacher of Communication Psychology and Psychosomatic Medicine at various institutions, he is the Chairmain of the Isituto di Formazione Europeo and a teacher of ECM courses at the Fondazione Maugeri di Montescano.

Documentary-maker and visual sociologist, Rossano deals with visual sociology and anthropology at the University of Barcelona, where he concluded a Ph.D. in Sociology in 2016. In 2002, he graduated in Law at the Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II and three years later he obtained his Diploma of specialiation in cinema direction at the Centre d’Estudis Cinematografics de Catalunya. In 2006, he attended and concluded the Master’s Course in Management for Showbusiness at the SDA Bocconi in Milan. An expert in video-making and in the organisation of cultural and theatre events, he has worked at the Piccolo Teatro di Milano (2006) and at the Napoli Teatro Festival Italia (2009-2010). Rossano is the author of documentaries that have participated in various international festivals and is an arduous writer of academic articles and short stories. His research activity falls within the disciplinary field of Sociology and Anthropology, in connection with audiovisual methodologies and techniques.

Architect and journalist, Scarzella is a communication expert and a consultant for companies in the design industry as well as curator of research projects, books and international design exhibitions. She has been the editor of the magazine Domus and writes about design and architecture on specialized international magazines. She has been professor at Università La Sapienza in Rome, Università di Genova and at the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn. Founder and vice president of the association DComeDesign for the promotion of female creativity, she designed and currently leads, together with Valentina Downey, the LabBrainDesign. Since 2010 she has been actively working in social design, developing training projects in contexts of social unrest in Asia and Africa and has been collaborating with UNIDO – United Nations Industrial Development Organization. Photographic research, her lifelong passion, is an important tool for her creative work.

Bottoli is involved in professional and research activities in interior public and urban inhabited spaces. After many years of teaching at the Design School of the Politecnico di Milano, he concluded his academic activity in 2014/15 with the chair of “Urban set design and design methodology” at the Academy of Fine Arts in Macerata. Today, he teaches only in some select university courses and Professional Associations. With respect to urban spaces he proposes a radical evolution of traditional “Colour Plans” and for closed spaces he experiments with forms of engagement of the artistic gesture in daily life. With Giulio Bertagna he is currently working on the promotion of a new method of design and colour rendering management called ACD, Advanced Colour Design. He is a member of ADI – Association for Industrial Design at BEDA. Among the founders of Gruppo del Colore – Associazione Italiana Colore (Italian Colour Association), he is also a member of the Presidency Council and of the Technical and Scientific Committee.

An industrial designer, Barki graduated in Industrial Design at NABA, and then continued her studies at the Università Elisava in Barcelona. Winner of various Design contests, she exhibited her works at the Power Power Station of Art in Shanghai, at the Salone del Mobile and at the Fuori Salone in Milan. Parallel to her professional activity she is also active in academic life, where she teaches digital modelling techniques and interaction design. In the world of design, she is mainly interested in product design, graphic design and 3D modelling. The latter, in particular fast prototyping, has allowed her to develop projects and collaborations with various companies, among which are DWS Systems and Zortrax, in the field of 3D printing design, and to exhibit her works at the CES in Las Vegas, Formnext (Frankfurt), at the Mecspe (Parma) and Maker Faire in Rome. She writes articles and is a speaker at conferences and seminars on the union between fast prototyping and Design.

Moscatelli graduated in Architecture at the Politecnico di Milano and subsequently obtained a Master’s degree in “Territory and Sustainable Architecture”. After collaborating with studio EMBT in Barcelona, since 2008 she has been working with Studio Moscatelli on architecture and urban design, receiving awards and acknowledgements for redevelopment projects for buildings and public spaces. He has published articles on some magazines of the industry, such as Ananke and Area, and has taken part in the realisation of the monographic volumes On the road – Milano and Archibook Expo 2015. Since 2011 he has been teaching in Italy and abroad. He has held presentations and conferences at the Association of Architects PPC in Como and Brescia, at Politecnico di Milano and at the Floormart fair.

After graduating in Industrial design in Melbourne, he moved to Milan to complete a Master’s degree in Car Design. Upon its conclusion, he worked for ten years as a freelancer in professional design firms, combining his activity as a designer with teaching. Salerno has designed for Sony, Chicco, Fiat, Ferrari, Indesit, Argotractors, Luxottica, Piaggio, Pirelli, Microsoft, and others and has obtained several patents and awards. He is currently senior Industrial Design Specialist at BTS Design Innovation, has taught more than 500 students in Master’s and pre-Master’s courses at university level. He strongly believes in harmonising several disciplines and interests in the attempt of making the world a better place through design.

After obtaining a degree in architecture at the Politecnico di Milano, he embarked on a professional experience outside Italy and then joined his family’s design firm in 1997 as an associate. Gecchelin currently manages the firm. He has collaborated with various national and international brands, such as: IGuzzini illuminazione, Ivela, Reggiani, Raat, Kelvin Italy, Aermec Sierra, and Whirlpool. In 2002, he won the ADI Compasso d’Oro for the Latina citrus juicer produced by Fratelli Guzzini. His background as an architect and his strong interest in all aspects of creativity and technology have granted him a multi-disciplinary view that ranges from interior to graphic design, from photography to illustration. He matured teaching experiences in various institutions in Milan (among which are the Politecnico di Milano and IED) before joining the RM faculty.

Graduated in Architecture at Istituto Universitario di Venezia, she holds a Ph.D. in Design for Cultural Heritage at Design Department of Politecnico di Milano. She carries out multidisciplinary researches on design, art and architecture focusing on the enhancement of the heritage through digital archives and tools, to foster novel learning models. She has been involved in research projects at academic and institutional level, dedicated to curatorship, coordination and organization of exhibitions, workshops, conferences and cultural events. She also writes on design, art and architecture, for blogs and online magazines.

From 1996 to 2000, Carlo Dameno worked with Carmelo Di Bartolo, where he supervised work with such firms as Lego Futura, Gillette, Fiat, Sunstar, Oral B, Lavazza and Bosch as project manager. In 1999, he joined Design Innovation as co-ordinator of the bionics and concept design research area, developing projects with Fiat, Piaggio, Tensoforma, Ariete and others. In 2008, he teamed up with Monica Ferrigno to establish Ildoppiosegno, a design office with a dual identity, focusing on the one hand on industrial design and on the other on research. The office has worked with such clients as Bayer, Status, United Pets, New Holland, Samsung, Piazza and iBarzaghi. He has lectured in bionics in Turin, Madrid, Milan and at the Technological Institute of Aragon, in Zaragoza. A tutor in the creativity and design workshop in the degree course in Corporate Communication at the IULM University in Milan, he is a participant in BIOMA, the international symposium in bionics and design at the University of Aveiro, in Portugal.

Camila Fecchio graduated in Industrial Design from Milan Polytechnic specializing in Communication Design, then took a diploma from the Alta Scuola Politecnica in 2007. She has worked in research and corporate consultancy, first spending two years at the Milan Polytechnic Department of Management Engineering, where she focused on design-led innovation, then moving to Design Innovation, the structure created in 1998 by Carmelo Di Bartolo and Maria del Pino Molina Betancor, where she co-ordinated strategic and advanced design projects. She has lectured at Milan Polytechnic for seven years and was didactic co-ordinator of DIBA, the Design Innovation Business Academy in 2010. In the same year, she started lecturing and co-ordinating the course in Creativity and Design at the Faculty of Communication, Public Relations and Advertising at Milan’s IULM University. Since 2012, she has also been doing graphic and communication design work for the web.

Born in Turin in 1966, he attended the Photography Department of the Istituto Europeo di Design. After his studies, he started his career as a photographer, ranging from portraits and celebrity shots to the fields of beauty, fashion and advertising. His portfolio includes works for FIAT, Iveco, Lavazza, Chicco and Oréal. He studied and developed the image of various celebrities in showbusiness, such as Arturo Brachetti, Luciana Littizzetto, Subsonica, Fernanda Lessa, Antonella Elia, Neja. In recent years, he has extended his research to video language, both as a director and as a director of photography (he created the video for Alfonso di Levante). Ranzani is the author of the following publications: Ecce Femina (2000), 99 per Amnesty (2003), La Soglia. Vita, carcere e teatro, and Go 4 it/Universiadi 2007. He was the person of reference for the artistic group 4k in the project Torino Mosaico, and for the artistic group Dead Photo Working in the opening project of Luci d’Artista in Turin. He conceived and organised the international photography contest OPEN PICS for the Turin Book Fair. He is currently the President of AFIP Torino.

Born in 1947, Carlo Forcolini graduated from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan in 1969. From 1975 to 1979, he worked with ICF De Padova, while at the same time he started to work with Vico Magistretti, one of the great masters of Italian design. From 1978 to 1984, he lived in London, where he was one of the founders of Alias and became Director of Artemide GB. In 1992, he founded Nemo and in 1999 Forcolini.Lab, followed in 2005 by Oylight. Over the years, he has designed for Amar, Cassina, BBB Bonacina, Luceplan, Luci Italia, Gervasoni, Joint and Pomellato. From 2001 to 2007, he served as President of ADI, Associazione per il Disegno Industriale, and in 2007 was appointed a member of the Consiglio Italiano del Design. From 2009 to 2014, he was, in this order, CEO, then Vice-President and finally Academic Director of the IED Group. His designs feature in the collections of the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York, in the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris, in the Design Museum at the Milan Triennale and in the Collection of the ADI Compasso d’Oro Award. He has shown his work in exhibitions in Madrid, Los Angeles, London, Hamburg, Cologne, Tokyo, Sidney, Santiago, Moscow, Oslo, Naples, Milan, Toronto and Brussels.

After taking her diploma at the Accademia di Comunicazione in Milan, Chiara Grandesso went on to take a Masters in Communication in Art & Design at the Royal College of Art in London. She then won a scholarship to continue pursuing her research at the Kyoto City University of Arts in Japan. Once back in Europe, she won the Parallel Prize and was subsequently invited by Philippe Starck to start working with him in his Paris office. Although she maintained a partnership with the office upon returning to Italy after this experience, she also started doing graphic design work on her own initiative. She has received acknowledgments from both the ADCI and the Padua municipal council Culture Department.

Graduated in Architecture at the Politecnico di Milano, since 2007 she has been partner of Bartoli Design with Carlo and Paolo, where she continues the experience gained in years of consulting and planning for leading interior design companies. Dealing with different fields (design, outfitting, architecture) she enriches small or large-scale projects with a holistic approach. Her activity ranges from brand creation to product strategies, as well as product design and product engineering. Several of her projects have received important awards: Tube, an innovative sofa for Rossi di Albizzate, received the IF Award for Good Industrial Design and is represented on Poste Italiane’s postal stamps with the theme “Italian design for a new domestic landscape”. Her chair R606 UNO in composite material for Segis received the Compasso d’Oro ADI in 2008 and the Materialica Design Award and the table Still for Bonaldo was awarded the Red Dot Award. In 2016 the Camel chair for Segis received the Golden Key Award.

His professional career has given him the chance to gain experience in different fields: from communication to financing service. He has successfully developed a new business and at the same time renewed new commercial networks and company organizations. He has a peculiar attitude towards strategic thinking, from team work to talent honing and management. As a Coach Manager, he is truly a remarkable specialist of relationships for the development and acquisition of fundamental self-awareness. He has had numerous managerial roles in important Italian and international companies ranging from Commercial Manager in Mondadori Advertising to General Manager in Cemit Interactive Media, and he has been the General Manager in Condé Nast. After a few years in consulting, he came back to the company field as a Managing Director and as CEO of Cerved's Finservice Group.

An industrial designer, Barki graduated in Industrial Design at NABA, and then continued her studies at the Università Elisava in Barcelona. Winner of various Design contests, she exhibited her works at the Power Power Station of Art in Shanghai, at the Salone del Mobile and at the Fuori Salone in Milan. Parallel to her professional activity she is also active in academic life, where she teaches digital modelling techniques and interaction design. In the world of design, she is mainly interested in product design, graphic design and 3D modelling. The latter, in particular fast prototyping, has allowed her to develop projects and collaborations with various companies, among which are DWS Systems and Zortrax, in the field of 3D printing design, and to exhibit her works at the CES in Las Vegas, Formnext (Frankfurt), at the Mecspe (Parma) and Maker Faire in Rome. She writes articles and is a speaker at conferences and seminars on the union between fast prototyping and Design.

Bottoli is involved in professional and research activities in interior public and urban inhabited spaces. After many years of teaching at the Design School of the Politecnico di Milano, he concluded his academic activity in 2014/15 with the chair of “Urban set design and design methodology” at the Academy of Fine Arts in Macerata. Today, he teaches only in some select university courses and Professional Associations. With respect to urban spaces he proposes a radical evolution of traditional “Colour Plans” and for closed spaces he experiments with forms of engagement of the artistic gesture in daily life. With Giulio Bertagna he is currently working on the promotion of a new method of design and colour rendering management called ACD, Advanced Colour Design. He is a member of ADI – Association for Industrial Design at BEDA. Among the founders of Gruppo del Colore – Associazione Italiana Colore (Italian Colour Association), he is also a member of the Presidency Council and of the Technical and Scientific Committee.

Bernstein studied Graphic Design at Politecnico di Milano and obtained a Master’s degree in Type Design at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague (NL). She is partner of Tiemme, a multidisciplinary design and architecture firm. She is an expert in the creation and development of identity systems and in the design of signage systems and signage for offices and public spaces. Since 2007 she has been teaching graphic design, typography and type design in international design schools and universities (among other things, she is a teacher of Typography at Politecnico di Milano and visiting professor at the School of Architecture and Design, Universidad de Navarra, Pamplona). She collaborates with several publications and takes part in conferences in the field of type and has collaborated on «Italic 2.0 Contemporary Type Design in Italy» (DeAgostini 2008).

Valan graduated in Industrial Design at IED Milan and subsequently obtained a Master’s degree in Quality of Surfaces. She worked with Clino Castelli on colour design projects in Europe and Japan and with Jorrit Tornquist on colour projects for architecture. She has worked in the field of office design in several fields, from seating design to ergonomics, from collaborations with Clino Castelli and James Irvine for Olivetti to the creation of office systems with Hisao Hosoe. In 1998 she founded her own studio and since then she has been designing the identity of products and spaces through the definition of colours, materials and finishes. Her projects range from lifts to office furniture, from electric appliances to sports equipment, from armoured doors to markers and glasses. Her clients include: Samsung, De Longhi Group, Lechler, Kone Ascensori, Lego, Artsana, Techogym, Fila, and Campari.

After studying Communication Design at Politecnico di Milano she joined Leftloft as an information designer and discovered her passion for the shape of data. In 2009 she started collaborating with the male magazine IL of the newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore. In 2010 she experimented with the first Italian digital magazine: La vita nòva — awarded by SPD, European Design Awards, Malofiej and D&AD. Her projects are featured in various publications such as: Data Flow2 (Die Gestalten Verlag), Designing news (Die Gestalten Verlag), Information Graphics (Taschen), and Visual Storytelling (Die Gestalten Verlag). In the following years, she collaborated with various magazines, such as the Mit Technology Review, Harvard Business Review, New York Magazine, Esquire, and Wired. Since 2013 she has been working as a professional journalist and is in charge of the digital design area at Il Sole 24 Ore, where she deals with interaction and interfaces of the daily digital products offered by the newspaper and by Radio24. She teaches at the Università IUAV (Venice) and at CFP Bauer (Milan).

Graduated at Politecnico di Milano with a specialisation in Health Design and Design for All. After collaborating with some Italian studios, since 2003 he has been working in product design for studio Arduini Design in medium and high-complexity industrial sectors, in the hospital field and in products for the disabled and for third age. He has developed research and experimental concepts as well as applications of innovative materials for various Italian and international companies. He has taught and held workshops in various design schools, such as the Faculty of Architecture in Genoa, Laba in Brescia and Politecnico di Milano. He is a consultant for some in-house training companies for the design of training and recreational activities.

After his degree in Industrial Design he started working at studio Zanuso. Later, he worked as a consultant for Design Group Italia and became a business partner at studio Arduini Bonfanti e Salvemini. His main field of work is the design of durable goods, also produced with complex technologies, with special focus on the development and experimentation of innovative systems. Interested in design issues applied to disability and Design for All (Inclusive Design) he founded EIDD in Dublin – European Institute for Design and Disability (now Design for All Europe), of IIDD – Italian Institute for Design and Disability and of Hbgroup – Human Basic Design. Occasional collaborator with specialised magazines and design universities, he is a faculty member in the Industrial Design Degree at the University of Genoa. Winner of a Compasso d’Oro and of a National Award for Innovation, he has also received mentions in national and international design awards.

Baldessari graduated in Industrial Design at IED Milan in 1980, where she subsequently worked as an assistant in design courses for a few years. She gained her professional experience in firms that operate in the field of design, in particular studio Danilo and Corrado Aroldi and studio Isao Hosoe design. In 1983 she founded “Baldessari e Baldessari architetti e designers” with Giulio and Paolo Baldessari, professional partners who are active in the fields of industrial and visual design, architecture, exhibit and interior design. She develops and participates in international design projects with important Italian and foreign studios working in the world of furniture and lighting design. She has been awarded prizes and mentions taking part in national and international contests. She is a professor of Design History and Interior Design at the Academy of Fine Arts and, since 2018, at RM.

Moscatelli graduated in Architecture at the Politecnico di Milano and subsequently obtained a Master’s degree in “Territory and Sustainable Architecture”. After collaborating with studio EMBT in Barcelona, since 2008 she has been working with Studio Moscatelli on architecture and urban design, receiving awards and acknowledgements for redevelopment projects for buildings and public spaces. He has published articles on some magazines of the industry, such as Ananke and Area, and has taken part in the realisation of the monographic volumes On the road – Milano and Archibook Expo 2015. Since 2011 he has been teaching in Italy and abroad. He has held presentations and conferences at the Association of Architects PPC in Como and Brescia, at Politecnico di Milano and at the Floormart fair.

Architect and journalist, Scarzella is a communication expert and a consultant for companies in the design industry as well as curator of research projects, books and international design exhibitions. She has been the editor of the magazine Domus and writes about design and architecture on specialized international magazines. She has been professor at Università La Sapienza in Rome, Università di Genova and at the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn. Founder and vice president of the association DComeDesign for the promotion of female creativity, she designed and currently leads, together with Valentina Downey, the LabBrainDesign. Since 2010 she has been actively working in social design, developing training projects in contexts of social unrest in Asia and Africa and has been collaborating with UNIDO – United Nations Industrial Development Organization. Photographic research, her lifelong passion, is an important tool for her creative work.

A professional journalist, Masini graduated in Italian literature with a specialisation in Art History at the Università degli Studi La Sapienza (Rome). He writes for Quotidiano Nazionale (Il Giorno, il Resto del Carlino, La Nazione) and over the past thirty years he has held various posts in the Group, until becoming the manager of editorial projects. He has a Master’s degree in marketing and communication and another in digital marketing lab, both acquired at the Sole-24 Ore’s Business School. He has taught “Media languages” and “Art Markets” at the Università degli Studi Carlo Bo in Urbino. He was a member of the Board of Directors at Ads and Audipress and a member of the Design Prize scientific committee. He recently published the book Gabriella Crespi, Spirito e Materia, arte e design (Gabriella Crespi, Spirit and Matter, art and design) for Odoya.

Born in Milan in 1961, at the age of twenty-five Francesco Dondina established Dondina Associates to work in the fields of brand identity and communication design, focusing primarily on its applications to the areas of fashion, design, art and culture. His studio’s more important clients have included Giorgio Armani, Krizia, Valentino, Ferragamo, L’Oréal Paris, Cassina, the City of Milan, the MoMA, Feltrinelli and MUBA, the Milan Children’s Museum. He designed the images for the exhibitions of Bramantino in the Sforza Castle and of Bernardino Luini in the Royal Palace, both in Milan. With Marco Zanuso Jr. and Giuseppe Rabonim he designed the ticket offices for Expo Milano 2015. From 2010 to 2012, Dondina Associates also had a base in New York, since in that period he partnered with the Asia Society Museum and the American Ballet Theatre. In 2009, he published a book of an interview with Bob Noorda, Una vita nel segno della grafica. In 2015, he devised the Graphic Design Lectures cycle of events held at the Sforza Castle and, in 2016, he curated SIGNS, an exhibition about contemporary Italian graphic design held in the Base location in Milan. He has taught at the Cfp Bauer and Milan Polytechnic for many years.

Translator, conference interpreter and professor of English language, she graduated in English Language and Literature at the University of Aarhus and accomplished a research PhD in Theory of Translation at the University of Milan. She has been teaching both in Italian and international universities and in corporate contexts for 15 years. This experience gave her the chance to be able to deal with students from different cultures and educational backgrounds, with the aim to make them reach a good language level for several social and professional operating contexts. Besides, she works as Project Manager for important translation assignments and interpreting projects. She released monographies on language didactics and contributed to numerous academic papers in this field.

Graduated in Psychology at the University of Padua, he is registered in the Register of Psychotherapists in the region of Lombardy. After a second degree in Philosophy, he conducted extensive philosophical research also on oriental cultures. This research effort led to the foundation of the Kuan Institute in 1985, an institute for the diffusion of Chinese Medicine in Italy. He is a member of the American Psychological Association. Already active as a teacher of Communication Psychology and Psychosomatic Medicine at various institutions, he is the Chairmain of the Isituto di Formazione Europeo and a teacher of ECM courses at the Fondazione Maugeri di Montescano.

Documentary-maker and visual sociologist, Rossano deals with visual sociology and anthropology at the University of Barcelona, where he concluded a Ph.D. in Sociology in 2016. In 2002, he graduated in Law at the Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II and three years later he obtained his Diploma of specialiation in cinema direction at the Centre d’Estudis Cinematografics de Catalunya. In 2006, he attended and concluded the Master’s Course in Management for Showbusiness at the SDA Bocconi in Milan. An expert in video-making and in the organisation of cultural and theatre events, he has worked at the Piccolo Teatro di Milano (2006) and at the Napoli Teatro Festival Italia (2009-2010). Rossano is the author of documentaries that have participated in various international festivals and is an arduous writer of academic articles and short stories. His research activity falls within the disciplinary field of Sociology and Anthropology, in connection with audiovisual methodologies and techniques.

Valentina Di Francesco, communication designer and journalist, combines her intense publishing activity on the magazine Lotus International with the organisation of architecture and design exhibitions (Venice Biennale, Milan Triennale). Graduated in Industrial Design, she has been a teacher at the Design Faculty of Politecnico di Milano. After a diploma in photography at CFP Bauer, she worked as a researcher and photographer. In 2001 she was the first cool hunter and news correspondent from Milan for the Research Institute Future Concept Lab. Stefano Frattini, communication designer and photographer, works as a graphic designer and art director in publishing (Skira, Rizzoli). Since 2005 he has been supervising brand identity projects at Studio Gentili (Autogrill, Fiat, Volkswagen, Corriere della Sera, Guzzini). In 2009 he was in Argentina with the NGO AVSI to develop communication projects for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He has been working in visual design and photography since 2010. Together they founded Ecle, a visual and brand identity studio.

Born in Turin in 1966, he attended the Photography Department of the Istituto Europeo di Design. After his studies, he started his career as a photographer, ranging from portraits and celebrity shots to the fields of beauty, fashion and advertising. His portfolio includes works for FIAT, Iveco, Lavazza, Chicco and Oréal. He studied and developed the image of various celebrities in showbusiness, such as Arturo Brachetti, Luciana Littizzetto, Subsonica, Fernanda Lessa, Antonella Elia, Neja. In recent years, he has extended his research to video language, both as a director and as a director of photography (he created the video for Alfonso di Levante). Ranzani is the author of the following publications: Ecce Femina (2000), 99 per Amnesty (2003), La Soglia. Vita, carcere e teatro, and Go 4 it/Universiadi 2007. He was the person of reference for the artistic group 4k in the project Torino Mosaico, and for the artistic group Dead Photo Working in the opening project of Luci d’Artista in Turin. He conceived and organised the international photography contest OPEN PICS for the Turin Book Fair. He is currently the President of AFIP Torino.

After graduating with full marks from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, Lia Luzzatto continued her studies, exploring the fields of fashion and specialising in hardcopy and digital chromatic communication. She now works as a colour consultant in many fields, writes books, takes part in seminars and teaches. Because of its symbolic, communicative, psychological and sensory complexity, colour is a vital resource in every visual context. Lia Luzzatto lectures in Colour Theory at the Academy of Communication and the Luxury Lab in the Academy of Luxury in Milan. Writing together with Renata Pompas, whom she met attending Luigi Veronesi’s lectures in chromatology at the Academy, she has published numerous books about colour that are constantly going through reprints for publishers including Hoepli, Il Castello and Bompiani. She is a founder member of the Italian Colour Association’s Colour Group and is a member of its Presidency Council and Scientific Committee. Previously a member of the CISST – Italian Centre for Studying the History of Fabrics – and of ADI, she is currently a member of the ECD Environmental Colour Design of Buenos Aires and of the Stockholm-based Colour Study Group.

After taking her diploma at the Accademia di Comunicazione in Milan, Chiara Grandesso went on to take a Masters in Communication in Art & Design at the Royal College of Art in London. She then won a scholarship to continue pursuing her research at the Kyoto City University of Arts in Japan. Once back in Europe, she won the Parallel Prize and was subsequently invited by Philippe Starck to start working with him in his Paris office. Although she maintained a partnership with the office upon returning to Italy after this experience, she also started doing graphic design work on her own initiative. She has received acknowledgments from both the ADCI and the Padua municipal council Culture Department.

Born in Caracas in 1957 to Italian parents, Giulio Vinaccia moved to Italy in 1985 and spent the years from 1997 to 2012 working with his brother Valerio in the area of industrial design, while also starting to take an interest in social design in his native Colombia in 1993. From 1996 to 2002, he worked with SEBRAE, the Brazilian Support Service for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises, developing a dozen projects of design for craftsmanship in several communities of Brazil. In 2004, the Spanish government commissioned him to carry out a project to study the iconography of the Camino de Santiago. He subsequently worked to flank communities in critical condition in Sweden, Canada, Afghanistan and Egypt. Since 2009, he has been working with the development programmes at the UNIDO – United Nations Industrial Development Organisation – in China, Haiti and the five Caribbean states, Pakistan, Madagascar and seven southern Mediterranean countries. In 2015, he won the World Green Design Contribution Award and in 2016, together with UNIDO, the ADI Compasso d’Oro Award, the first one every presented in the award’s history to the category of social design.

After obtaining a degree in architecture at the Politecnico di Milano, he embarked on a professional experience outside Italy and then joined his family’s design firm in 1997 as an associate. Gecchelin currently manages the firm. He has collaborated with various national and international brands, such as: IGuzzini illuminazione, Ivela, Reggiani, Raat, Kelvin Italy, Aermec Sierra, and Whirlpool. In 2002, he won the ADI Compasso d’Oro for the Latina citrus juicer produced by Fratelli Guzzini. His background as an architect and his strong interest in all aspects of creativity and technology have granted him a multi-disciplinary view that ranges from interior to graphic design, from photography to illustration. He matured teaching experiences in various institutions in Milan (among which are the Politecnico di Milano and IED) before joining the RM faculty.

Born in 1947, Carlo Forcolini graduated from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan in 1969. From 1975 to 1979, he worked with ICF De Padova, while at the same time he started to work with Vico Magistretti, one of the great masters of Italian design. From 1978 to 1984, he lived in London, where he was one of the founders of Alias and became Director of Artemide GB. In 1992, he founded Nemo and in 1999 Forcolini.Lab, followed in 2005 by Oylight. Over the years, he has designed for Amar, Cassina, BBB Bonacina, Luceplan, Luci Italia, Gervasoni, Joint and Pomellato. From 2001 to 2007, he served as President of ADI, Associazione per il Disegno Industriale, and in 2007 was appointed a member of the Consiglio Italiano del Design. From 2009 to 2014, he was, in this order, CEO, then Vice-President and finally Academic Director of the IED Group. His designs feature in the collections of the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York, in the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris, in the Design Museum at the Milan Triennale and in the Collection of the ADI Compasso d’Oro Award. He has shown his work in exhibitions in Madrid, Los Angeles, London, Hamburg, Cologne, Tokyo, Sidney, Santiago, Moscow, Oslo, Naples, Milan, Toronto and Brussels.

Camila Fecchio graduated in Industrial Design from Milan Polytechnic specializing in Communication Design, then took a diploma from the Alta Scuola Politecnica in 2007. She has worked in research and corporate consultancy, first spending two years at the Milan Polytechnic Department of Management Engineering, where she focused on design-led innovation, then moving to Design Innovation, the structure created in 1998 by Carmelo Di Bartolo and Maria del Pino Molina Betancor, where she co-ordinated strategic and advanced design projects. She has lectured at Milan Polytechnic for seven years and was didactic co-ordinator of DIBA, the Design Innovation Business Academy in 2010. In the same year, she started lecturing and co-ordinating the course in Creativity and Design at the Faculty of Communication, Public Relations and Advertising at Milan’s IULM University. Since 2012, she has also been doing graphic and communication design work for the web.

Mindert De Koningh was born in Haarlem, in the Netherlands, in 1958 and started working as a model maker after completing his studies. Working side by side with young Dutch designers sharpened his interest in everything related to industrial design, in due course leading to his decision to move to Milan in 1990. Meanwhile, in 1997, he founded Zooi and opened a workshop in via Savona. He attended both on teaching activities and on the production of prototypes for the students reading for Masters degrees in Industrial Design and in Fashion Design, his path crossing with those of many of the great names that animated the Milan design and art scenes. His work can be classified under two major headings: prototyping and building models and mock-ups for designers, firms and agencies working in all sorts of different industrial sectors; and consultancy and technical support services for artists in executing their works.

Born in 1981, Luigi Ciuffreda studied architecture and design at the École Supérieure d’Art et de Design in Orleans and at Milan Polytechnic, where he graduated in 2006 with a specialisation in museography and exhibition design for cultural heritage. From 2005 to 2007, he worked as an expert in the subject in the Interior Design workshops at the Milan Polytechnic Faculty of Design and, from 2013 to 2017, he lectured in design and exhibition design at the Milan Academy of Communication. He now operates in a variety of permutations of the field of design: product design, retail design, interior architecture an exhibition design. His more notable recent projects include the museographical design at the Lapidary Museum of Monte Sant’Angelo and the signage for the new NAS Arena stadium in Dubai. Since 2006, he has been a consultant with Buratti Architects, where he has collaborated on projects for B&B Italia, Fontana Arte, Living Divani, Poliform, Poltrona Frau, Porro, Tecno, Lamborghini, Ducati, Husqvarna, La Perla and Gebrüder Thonet of Vienna. Along with his professional activities, he devotes some of his time to personal research into illustration and graphic design.

After graduating in Industrial design in Melbourne, he moved to Milan to complete a Master’s degree in Car Design. Upon its conclusion, he worked for ten years as a freelancer in professional design firms, combining his activity as a designer with teaching. Salerno has designed for Sony, Chicco, Fiat, Ferrari, Indesit, Argotractors, Luxottica, Piaggio, Pirelli, Microsoft, and others and has obtained several patents and awards. He is currently senior Industrial Design Specialist at BTS Design Innovation, has taught more than 500 students in Master’s and pre-Master’s courses at university level. He strongly believes in harmonising several disciplines and interests in the attempt of making the world a better place through design.

From 1996 to 2000, Carlo Dameno worked with Carmelo Di Bartolo, where he supervised work with such firms as Lego Futura, Gillette, Fiat, Sunstar, Oral B, Lavazza and Bosch as project manager. In 1999, he joined Design Innovation as co-ordinator of the bionics and concept design research area, developing projects with Fiat, Piaggio, Tensoforma, Ariete and others. In 2008, he teamed up with Monica Ferrigno to establish Ildoppiosegno, a design office with a dual identity, focusing on the one hand on industrial design and on the other on research. The office has worked with such clients as Bayer, Status, United Pets, New Holland, Samsung, Piazza and iBarzaghi. He has lectured in bionics in Turin, Madrid, Milan and at the Technological Institute of Aragon, in Zaragoza. A tutor in the creativity and design workshop in the degree course in Corporate Communication at the IULM University in Milan, he is a participant in BIOMA, the international symposium in bionics and design at the University of Aveiro, in Portugal.

A professional life dedicated to materials and the reconstruction of value by means of design, as a designer, commentator and teacher. She taught Technology and New Materials at Domus Academy in Milan from the end of the ‘80s until 1996, and worked as an untenured professor at the Politecnico di Milano from 2004 to 2006. Already a teacher for the materials projects in Naba (Milan), in 2013 she launched the research R-Riparabile? on repairability and durability as new frontiers of responsible quality, with the aim of showing the world of enterprises, design, and research how people are trying to find an answer to this issue by means of design. An architect and a designer, she is an associate in the firm FRAGILE in Milan. With the academic year 2018/2019, she has become part of RM’s Faculty.

After his humanistic studies, Vergani trained himself as a scholar while he worked in a record shop. A brief experience in the world of design led him to become Luigi Settembrini and Francesca Sorace’s assistant in the year 2000 during their collaboration with the Cosmit for the exhibition “1951-2001, Made in Italy?”. In 2001, he founded Nowhere, the first example of a nomad exhibition space, and organised exhibitions in Milan, Paris, and Florence with this format. In 2003, he opened a permanent office in Milan, thus giving substance to his research activity in the field of contemporary art. During the same year, and until 2006, he worked as an editorial consultant for Skira. From 2007 to 2013 he was the Vice President of Startmilano, a sectorial association for the diffusion of contemporary art and culture. He has been writing about art for the newspaper Il Giorno/QN since 2009.

Graduated in Design at Politecnico di Milano, he is one of the founders of ROCKIT (www.rockit.it), a landmark for Italian music. In 2005 he created MI AMI (www.miamifestival.it), one of the main music festivals in Italy. After working with and for Universal Music France, ENT design Paris, Artclair Edition Paris, Edizioni Zero Milano, he is currently CEO of Better Days (www.betterdays.it), a hybrid company operating both as a publishing house and as a creative agency. Better Days currently manages Rockit.it, Dailybest.it and Dailyfood.it as well as the MI AMI festival. The company is in charge of the image of some important projects such as the Italia Music Export of SIAE and curator of street art/illustration exhibits all over Italy.

His professional career has given him the chance to gain experience in different fields: from communication to financing service. He has successfully developed a new business and at the same time renewed new commercial networks and company organizations. He has a peculiar attitude towards strategic thinking, from team work to talent honing and management. As a Coach Manager, he is truly a remarkable specialist of relationships for the development and acquisition of fundamental self-awareness. He has had numerous managerial roles in important Italian and international companies ranging from Commercial Manager in Mondadori Advertising to General Manager in Cemit Interactive Media, and he has been the General Manager in Condé Nast. After a few years in consulting, he came back to the company field as a Managing Director and as CEO of Cerved's Finservice Group.

Michele Genghi has over 15 years of experience in the field of branding and visual communication. He was the creative director of Landor Milano for five years and led the studio through multi-channel branding projects for important Italian and international clients, with skills ranging from visual identity to digital branding, sound branding, customer experience and way-finding environment design projects.

Graduated in History and Criticism of Art at Università Statale di Milano, he is a documentary maker, writer, and has been collaborating with artist Velasco Vitali since 2009. Since 2009 he has been working with CICAE (Confédération Internationale des Cinéma d’Art e d’Essai), teaching courses and holding lectures in various Italian universities (Università Bicocca of Milan, Università degli Studi di Pavia e di Milano, IULM, Università degli studi di Parma) and international campuses. In 2012 he published his first book of short stories 24 Fotogrammi: storia aneddotica del cinema (Secondavista Edizioni, 2012). Il Gesto delle Mani (The Gesture of Hands), his first full-length documentary, was presented at the 2015 Berlin International Film Festival in the category FORUM, where he was awarded the International Critics Award FIPRESCI. In 2017, on the occasion of Giancarlo Vitali’s solo painting exhibition, he organised a documentary/portrait of the artist at Palazzo Reale (Milan) “TIME OUT”. His works have been presented in various festivals and art institutions worldwide.

With a diploma in theatre direction at Scuola d’arte drammatica Paolo Grassi, he took a Master’s degree in Fine Arts in Screenwriting/Directing at Columbia University in New York. For many years, he has been working in the field of Movies, Advertising and Television ranging from cinematic/documentary projects to productions of commercials and branded contents for web and TV. His first movie Cavalli was presented at the 68th Venice Biennale of Cinema. In 2017 his documentary Mexico! Un Cinema alla riscossa was released in Italian movie theatres. He is one of the founders of the web radio Radio Raheem.

After his diploma in Illustration and Animation, Donati worked in Paris as an animator for a software house specialising in iPad apps. Once back in Milan, he continued his professional growth as motion graphic designer for a well-known advertising post-production house, working for large enterprises like Barilla, Armani, Volkswagen, Mulino Bianco and other important Italian brands. Today he is a consultant for Sky and other communication agencies in Milan, where he produces visual motion graphic contents applied to television, cinema and events. Since 2016 he has been combining his professional activity as a designer with teaching.

Artist, journalist, critic, he has been an art director for Corriere della Sera for many years, and continues to write for the newspaper on topics such as art, photography and visual communication. Strong with his iconological and iconographic experience in the newspaper, he has long been carrying out research on the dialogue between images and words. His artistic research on the past and on the stratification of the human glance has been exhibited in public spaces and museums such as Arengario in Milan (1998), Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires (2002), Manege Museum in Saint Petersburg (2003), MADRE in Naples (2011), IVAM in Valencia (2011), Fondazione Marconi (2012) and Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Pordenone (2013). After teaching at Università Cattolica di Milano and at Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage of Università di Parma, he currently teaches at RM-Raffles Milan and is a professor of Photographic Theory and Techniques at the IULM in Milan.

Claudia Neri was professionally (and spiritually) educated in North America, where she gained a long experience in the field of branding. She founded and currently manages Teikna Design in Milan, a creative, award-winning boutique specialised in brand identity and editorial projects. Her work is characterised by a content-driven approach combined with creative solutions that have received many acknowledgements, such as Communication Arts, Chicago Museum of Architecture and Design, American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) and Graphis. She has worked for clients both in Europe and overseas and recently signed the brand identity of the new Museum of Italian Judaism (MEIS). She is a designer and art director for FAO/ United Nations. She collaborated with universities such as IED, NABA and Fondazione Guggenheim in Venice. A member of the Jury in Cannes, the Art Director’s Club in New York, and the Art Director’s Club of Europe. She has been member of the Visual Design committee for the ADI Compasso d’oro. She regularly writes a blog on visual communication on the website of the ADCI Art Director’s Club Italiano.

Graphic and Experience designer, she started her professional activity at the newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore in 2014, after studying Communication Design at IUAV in Venice. Here, she had the chance to redesign the user experience and interface of Radio 24 and Il Sole 24 Ore. After collaborating with several communication agencies in Milan, in 2016 she joined the staff of studio Pomo where she mainly worked on research, concept and web design projects for clients in the fashion and luxury industry, such as Fornasetti, Santoni and La Rinascente. A curious designer with a high interest in new digital scenarios, her projects highlight a strong balance between user experience and the search of new communication languages. She is currently working as a consultant and freelance designer and is a member of the group SoapOpera Fanzine.

Born in London, Binfield graduated from St.Martin’s School of Art and and Pentagram, with Alan Fletcher. After that she moved to Rome and then to Milan, where she currently lives and works. Over the last few years she has been working in graphic design, illustration, and has created several personal works. A monograph of her work was published by Edizioni Charta (1995). The awards and acknowledgements she has received include: Best Illustrated Book of the year with N.3. Che mistero nasconde il giardino dei vicini?, published by Topipittori (2005, two awards), D&AD British Design and Art Direction, European Illustration, Art Directors’ Club Italiano and Associazione Illustratori Italiani. Throughout her career, she has collaborated with various schools where she painted murals with students. In 2013, she created an installation commissioned by the Politecnico and by the Municipality of Milan in piazza Leonardo da Vinci. She has exhibited her projects in several exhibitions in Italy and the UK.

Pasquale Di Meglio studied art and specialised in the Art of Printing. After a first period spent in various graphic design agencies and an experience in the publishing industry, in 2004 he founded Studio41, a design studio that will gave life to several collaborations in the field of cultural communication. In 2010 he moved to Milan where he started working for Lumen, branding agency that allowed him to enter into contact with many Italian and international brands. Since 2014 he has been the Design Director at CBA, a brand design agency of the WPP group, which offers a global perspective on the world of branding and design thanks to its international team.

Vagni is a teacher of Media Sociology at the University of Macerata and at the IULM in Milan, where he currently works as a researcher. He completed a Ph.D. in Sociology with a co-tutoring between IULM and The Sorbonne. He is a member of the Centre d’Études sur l'Actuel et le Quotidien (CEAQ) and held a fellowship at the ATOPOS international research centre of Universidade de São Paulo (ECA-USP). His works focus on cultural industry, social media and gastronomy. He directs the book series iMedia at Edizioni Estemporanee (Rome) and collaborates with Gruppo Editoriale L’Espresso and with the magazine Mark Up. He has edited the Italian version of several essays on media theory, among which is Patrice Flichy’s La società degli amatori. Sociologia delle passioni ordinarie nell’era digitale (Naples 2014). His last book is Abitare la TV. Teorie, immaginari, reality show (Milan, 2017).

After a degree in Graphic Design and Multimedia and a Master’s degree in Advertising at IED Milan, he started working as Art Director for different Italian and international advertising agencies (Lorenzo Marini, TBWA, Ogilvy & Mather). He worked on advertising campaigns for clients like Levissima, ING, Gazzetta dello Sport, Corriere della Sera, Nestlè, Eni and Paramount Channel. He received several awards among which are 2 golds, 1 silver and 2 bronzes at the ADCI Awards and was included in a shortlist at the Cannes Lions Awards. Before teaching at RM_Raffles Milan, he was a teacher at IED (Milan) and a Coordinator and Teacher of the chair in Graphic Design and Multimedia at the Academy of Fine Arts (Brescia).

Graduated at Concordia University in Montreal, she opened her first studio in the same city. She then moved to Milan in 1980s, where, after a collaboration with studio Pierluigi Cerri/Gregotti Associati International, she became the Design Director in the Benetton and Prada Groups. Her clients include: Barilla, Bulgari, Ferragamo, Fabriano, Fedrigoni, Knoll, Moleskine, San Carlo, Swatch, TV5 and Vatican (she was a member of the multi-award winning team that designed the Holy See Pavilion at Milan EXPO 2015). Her works were published, exhibited and awarded worldwide. Speaker in many design conferences and a member of international panels, she was teacher at IUAV (Venice) and visiting professor in many international universities. For her merits Ginette was nominated member of the Royal Academy of Arts and appointed International Ambassador Canada 150 by the Minister of Canadian Heritage in 2017, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Confederation.

Dennel studied Graphic Design at the École Supérieure d’Art et de Design d’Amiens. After his graduation, he worked in Berlin for a year, where he collaborated with Katja Gretzinger and the studio Neue Gestaltung. He then returned to France and spent the next ten years working with clients such as the Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, the Centre National des Arts Plastiques, and the magazine Arch+. Pedagogy and the transmission of knowledge play an important role in his approach to design: he has been teaching since 2012, is regularly involved in workshops, and frequently collaborates with Villa Medici. He is currently collaborating with studio Pomo in Milan and manages various artistic direction projects, especially for Mila Schön and the pastry shop Marchesi. His works were exhibited at the MoMA in New York, and are now part of the museum’s permanent collection.

After a degree in Communication at the Università di Bologna she completed a Ph.D. in Semiotics at the Scuola Superiore di Studi Umanistici di Umberto Eco. She is specialised in the analysis of the media and of social stereotypes and studies the representation of gender in advertising and social advertising. Parallel with her scientific interests, she also works as a content manager and web writer. She has worked for l’Unità, Il Fatto Quotidiano, Bayer, CGIL, Discovery Channel and Realtime, among others. She collaborates with communication agencies and multinational companies on scientific copywriting and copy-editing SEO projects. She is a teacher of Semiotics at the IULM in Milan and collaborates with Stefano Bartezzaghi.

Semiologist and teacher of semiotics and anthropology, she curates and anchors the video series Polisemantica, il mondo in un segno, I simboli nell’arte, Semeion, i simboli e la storia, Sign&Design, simboli e storia degli oggetti di Design, Moda e Lusso. She is a consultant in semiomarketing, fashion semiology, fashion video advertising, net semiology and virtual fashion. She joined RM-Raffles Milan after a twenty-year long experience in teaching symbology applied to products at several prestigious European universities, such as IESA, IFA, ISCOM, PSB and IESEG (Paris), Istituto Marangoni (Paris and Milan), IED and Domus Academy (Milan), Style and Design College, Polimoda (Florence) and Università di Bologna. Author of several publications on semiotics applied to design, art, web, fashion and food&wine. She has been editor-in-chief of the magazine QC2, quaderni di comunicazione.

With a Ph.D. on the History and Criticism of Architecture, she has been a professor of Contemporary Art and Multimedia Communication at the Università della Campania. Already a university researcher in Contemporary Art History, she is currently a university researcher in Cinema, Photography and Television at the IULM in Milan, where she teaches Art and Media Curatorship, Art and Television, Cultural Heritage, Arts and Tourism and is member of the Ph.D. Board in Visual and Media Studies. She has always been combining designing with her activity of coordinating volumes, catalogues, and international exhibitions. In 2015, she coordinated the curatorial staff of the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Art. She is currently coordinating the editorial project for the Treccani Encyclopaedia of Contemporary Art and collaborates with the monthly magazine Arte. Her research, which is published both in book form, papers and articles, falls within in the framework of visual studies and is aimed at exploring intermedia processes and situations.

After studying Communication Design at Politecnico di Milano she joined Leftloft as an information designer and discovered her passion for the shape of data. In 2009 she started collaborating with the male magazine IL of the newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore. In 2010 she experimented with the first Italian digital magazine: La vita nòva — awarded by SPD, European Design Awards, Malofiej and D&AD. Her projects are featured in various publications such as: Data Flow2 (Die Gestalten Verlag), Designing news (Die Gestalten Verlag), Information Graphics (Taschen), and Visual Storytelling (Die Gestalten Verlag). In the following years, she collaborated with various magazines, such as the Mit Technology Review, Harvard Business Review, New York Magazine, Esquire, and Wired. Since 2013 she has been working as a professional journalist and is in charge of the digital design area at Il Sole 24 Ore, where she deals with interaction and interfaces of the daily digital products offered by the newspaper and by Radio24. She teaches at the Università IUAV (Venice) and at CFP Bauer (Milan).

An architect, Franco Achilli trained with Alfred Hohenegger, Giorgio Fioravanti and Gianni Sassi, then at the New York School of Visual Arts. After acting as assistant to Emilio Fioravanti at G&R Associati, he opened his own first office in Milan in 1985 with Guglielmo Ghizzardi and Mario Piazza. In 1995, he launched A+G Achilli Ghizzardi Associati, which he still runs today, working in architecture, brand and exhibition design, and publishing graphics. His clients in a career spanning over thirty years have included industrial and commercial groups, publishers and international organisations. He has continuous experience in lecturing in design schools and teaches Visual Identity in Brands at the IULM University in Milan. He has been a Visiting Professor at the Northern Illinois University and had held courses at the University of Palermo, the Art Institute of Chicago, Milan Polytechnic, the IUAV in Venice and other universities. The acknowledgements he has received for his teaching work include ten awards from the Designer & Art Directors Club of London. He has written and edited publications about design and his work has featured in leading international magazines.

Born in 1958 in Legnano, Italy, he started dealing with photography and recorded the 1980 earthquake in the South of Italy. Shortly after, he obtained an ASSAP scholarship in advertising. The human body and design make up the core of his professional career, in which he has always sought to make the two converge. In 1990 he held his first solo exhibition at the gallery Il Diaframma in Milan. He collaborated with big names of the design world such as Enrico Baleri, Achille Castiglioni, Giovanni Levanti, Italo Lupi, Alessandro Mendini, Gaetano Pesce, Christoph Radl and Gianni Veneziano. He also contributed to several magazines, such as Stern, Esquire, Abitare, Domus, Interni magazine, Panorama, Class, Capital and GQ. He signed campaigns for Cassina, Flexform, IBM, Prada and Baleri Italia. Since the 2013 edition of Fuorisalone he has been designing and conceiving a social network format for Mondadori. In the field of design photography, his main focus is to move beyond the dimension of the genre to embrace a transversal vision.

Born in 1972 in Monfalcone, he studied architecture in Genoa, where he began to collaborate as a sound engineer and light designer on film sets. Once in Milan, he dealt with video art and then, together with Stefano Boeri, he founded Multiplicity, a multidisciplinary collective merging visual art experience and urban design. He collaborated with Mercurio, a production studio in Milan, working as filmmaker for several ads. The following are among his most recent productions: FCA, BPER, Yamaha, Ramazzotti, GDF Suez, ENI, Indesit, Vodafone, Feltrinelli and Morellato. He is mainly known for working on music videos. In 2004, he directed music clips for Jovanotti, Tiziano Ferro, Rezophobic, Piero Pelù, Zucchero, velvet, Negramaro, Gemelli Diversi, Nek, Subsonica, Planet Funk, Motel Connection. In 2006, he was awarded the Premio Video Clip Italiano thanks to Incantevole by Subsonica. In 2003, he won Premio Solinas for the best subject in the feature film Una buona ragione.

In 1995 she graduated in Foreign Languages and Literature at the IULM in Milan, where she also completed a Ph.D. in Business Marketing and Communication from 2002 to 2005. From 2005 to 2008 she has been a teacher in the degree on Communication Sciences at Università Vita e Salute San Raffaele in Milan. In the same period she has held seminars on advertising language in the UPA Master’s at Ca’ Foscari in Venice and has been a teacher at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia per l’Impresa in Milan. Since 2009 she has been a researcher and teacher at the IULM. Her main research areas are gender representation in advertising, body representation in the media and sociology of communication and consumption trends. Among her publications are La pubblicità intelligente. L’uso dell’ironia in pubblicità (Intelligent Advertising. The use of Irony in Advertising) (2005), Communication mix. Come comunica l’impresa (Communication mix. How Businesses Communicate) (2007), Criminality show. La costruzione mediatica del colpevole (Criminality show. The mediatic construction of the culprit) (2010) and Pubblicità e valori. Nuovi consumi e nuovi messaggi per una società che cambia (Advertising and Values. New Consumptions and New Messages for a Changing Society) (2015).

Born in 1982, Corrado Musmeci graduated in Business Economics with a specialisation in Corporate Organisation, then worked on commercial and communication management with Fontegrafica, the family firm established by his father, of which he is now sole administrator. Fontegrafica has carved itself a distinctive niche on the printing scene and is now considered to be an international benchmark for typographic research and high-quality production. It has achieved this by accumulating specific experience in executing projects for the luxury, fashion and design sectors. Corrado Musmeci is very active in professional printing circles: he is a member of the Board of Directors of the ITS Rizzoli Institute and Vice-President of the Milan Industrial Graphics Union and has lectured in university Masters courses in Milan. He never passes up an opportunity to support and promote the culture of printed communication, partnering with institutions, schools, influencers and brands.

After taking his diploma in 1984 at the Arte e Messaggio Civic School of Applied Arts in Milan, Stefano Fabbri spent the period from 1986 to 1987 as assistant art director to Gino Ciccognani in the Studio Nuovi Prodotti advertising agency. In the two following years, he then pursued his career as an assistant art director further in the international agency Saatchi & Saatchi. From 1989 to 2005, he worked as a visualiser and illustrator with several leading agencies, including Saatchi & Saatchi, Verba DDB, J.W. Thompson and Bates. At present, he works regularly with several publications and publishers: the newspapers and magazines Corriere della Sera, Lo Specchio della Stampa, Auto Oggi, Le Scienze, Men’s Health, Panorama, Riders, Focus and Mente&Cervello and the publishers Feltrinelli, Stampa Alternativa, Mondadori, Besa and Helblings Languages. He has co-ordinated several illustration workshops at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan. In 2005, he won the Oesterheld Award at the Romacartoon International Cartoon Festival for his graphic novel Il monile di Bengasi, whose texts were written by the author Danilo Manera.

Born in Syracuse, in Sicily in 1978, Davide Calluori graduated in Art from the DAMS school in Bologna, then moved to Milan, where he took a diploma in Graphic Design from the Accademia di Comunicazione. He started his professional career at DLV BBDO as an art director. He then developed an interest in creating and producing images for printing. He became the manager for the post-production, 3D and illustration department. At the beginning of 2016, he teamed up with Daniele Tribi and Francesco Van Straten to establish B612Studio, a structure that works with illustration, 3D, post-production and photography. The clients he has completed projects for include Yamaha, Freddy, Cam, Rolling Stone, Wall Street Institute, Che Banca!, Bayer, Telecom, Sky and Audi. His work appeared in the 2012, 2014 and 2016 editions of the 200 Best Digital Artists Worldwide Annual Award and of the 200 Best Illustrators Worldwide Annual Award published by Lürzer’s Archive.

After graduating in Communication Design from Milan Polytechnic in 2005, Luisa Milani started working in the Leftloft graphic design office, where she stayed for five years and where she also achieved the realisation that graphic design is a passion for her first and only then also a job of work. She then founded La Tigre in 2009, an office that has worked successfully both in Italy and internationally from the very start. Over the years, the clients she has had the opportunity to develop projects for include The New York Times, The Guardian, Wired, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, IBM, Zucchi, Bassetti, ENI, Il Sole 24 Ore and Mondadori. After several years as an assistant at Milan Polytechnic and running several workshops, she started teaching in Turin in 2015. In 2012, she was named among the Young Guns by the Art Directors Club of New York. In 2014, she redesigned the logo of The Independent. In 2015, she received an acknowledgement from the Type Directors Club of New York and in 2016 one of her designs was selected as a finalist by the SPD, the Society of Publication Designers.

Born in Milan in 1940, Armando Milani is a leading figure on the Italian graphic and design scene. After studying at the Scuola Umanitaria under Albe Steiner, he started working with Antonio Boggeri and Giulio Confalonieri, before opening his own office in Milan in 1970. In 1977, he moved to New York, where he spent the next two years working with Massimo Vignelli, before opening his own office in that city, too, in 1979. He specialises in branding and corporate identity systems, logo, publishing, posters and websites. Since 1983 a member of the AGI Alliance Graphique Internationale, the association that brings together the world’s most authoritative graphic designers, he was elected to serve as its President in 2016. In 2004, he won an ADI Compasso d’Oro Award for a poster for the Promosedia event. In the same year, the United Nations published a poster of his promoting world peace, following it up in 2008 with the Human Design Collection. He has held courses in prestigious schools and universities in New York, Kansas City, Santo Domingo, Acapulco, Beijing, Lima, Karachi, Perugia, Milan, Naples, Santander, Brescia and Istanbul.

Class of 1959, Marcello Francone studied graphic design and photography at the Monza State Institute of Art under AG Fronzoni. From Fronzoni, he acquired a very strong design approach that induced him to “investigate the substance of things, not to linger on the surface and to remove elements rather than to add them”. After his studies, he worked with Friedemann Kaltbrunner in the Contact Studio and partnered with G&R Associati and with the Anselmi Studio. In 1983, he started acquiring experience in publishing with Electa, where he was made responsible for the graphic design office in 1985 and became art director in 1988. In 1994 to 2016, he started holding a course in publishing graphics for the third-year students at the Milan Academy of Communication. In 1995, he joined Skira, taking part in reviving the venerable art publisher’s fortunes, where he currently holds the position of Art Director. In 2005, he was Visiting Professor at the Milan Polytechnic Faculty of Design during which he conducted a worshop entitled "Drawing books that narrate design".

Andrea Braccaloni studied at the Milan Polytechnic Faculty of Architecture, where he also met his future partners. In 1997, with Francesco Cavalli, Bruno Genovese and David Pasquali, he founded the Leftloft design and communication agency, in which he works as design director, type designer and expert in communication strategy and analysis. The more significant projects he has worked on closely include designing the proprietary typeface for the newspaper Corriere della Sera, the signage and typography for Milan’s San Siro stadium, rebranding Moleskine, rebranding Oscar Mondadori and subito.it, art direction and communication for the Inter FC football club and various publishing products, such as the daily sports newspaper Dieci, the newspaper Manifesto and the magazines Panorama First, ICON, Focus and Sette del Corriere della Sera. He is a professional member of Aiap, the BEDA Register, ATypl and TDC. Since 2001, in addition to his professional work he has also been teaching at Milan Polytechnic, the CFP Bauer and the IED in Milan.

Lucio Lazzara was born in Milan, where he graduated in Architecture from Milan Polytechnic after spending several years studying at the Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture in Helsinki. After a period of experimentation in the field of graphic design and communication, in 2000 he founded the Zetalab design office, where he is still an active partner today. He has taken an interest in many different facets of design work, ranging from brand design and publishing graphics to exhibition and interaction design and photography. Underlying his method is his trust in knowledge and analysis as the foundation-stones of creativity. His clients have included esterni, Mondadori, Rizzoli, Mediaset, Internazionale, Smemoranda and the Milan Triennale and he has designed communications, spaces and events for Moleskine. He has lectured at Milan Polytechnic. He is one of the founder members of the Ministero della Grafica, a very lively cultural association whose aim is to nurture and strengthen design culture.

A graphic designer and calligrapher, Luca Barcellona uses lettering as the main component of his creations, whose aim is to induce the manual dimension of an art as age-old as handwriting to cohabit with the languages and tools available in the digital age. In 2003, he teamed up with Rae Martini and Marco Klefisch to found the collective Rebel Ink. In 2009, he worked with the calligrapher Klaus Peter Schaffel for the National Museum in Zurich to create a faithful reproduction of a large-scale globe whose original dated back to 1569, practising his calligraphy with original materials (goose quills and natural inks). The brands that have commissioned lettering from him include Carhartt, Nike, Mondadori, Zoo York, Dolce & Gabbana, Sony BMG, Seat, Volvo, Universal and Eni. He teaches calligraphy at the Italian Calligraphy Association and holds workshops in several European cities. In 2010, he produced his own clothing line, the Luca Barcellona Gold Series. More recently, he brought out his first monographic book, Take Your Pleasure Seriously, with the publisher Lazy Dog Press, where he is also a partner.

Born in Milan in 1961, at the age of twenty-five Francesco Dondina established Dondina Associates to work in the fields of brand identity and communication design, focusing primarily on its applications to the areas of fashion, design, art and culture. His studio’s more important clients have included Giorgio Armani, Krizia, Valentino, Ferragamo, L’Oréal Paris, Cassina, the City of Milan, the MoMA, Feltrinelli and MUBA, the Milan Children’s Museum. He designed the images for the exhibitions of Bramantino in the Sforza Castle and of Bernardino Luini in the Royal Palace, both in Milan. With Marco Zanuso Jr. and Giuseppe Rabonim he designed the ticket offices for Expo Milano 2015. From 2010 to 2012, Dondina Associates also had a base in New York, since in that period he partnered with the Asia Society Museum and the American Ballet Theatre. In 2009, he published a book of an interview with Bob Noorda, Una vita nel segno della grafica. In 2015, he devised the Graphic Design Lectures cycle of events held at the Sforza Castle and, in 2016, he curated SIGNS, an exhibition about contemporary Italian graphic design held in the Base location in Milan. He has taught at the Cfp Bauer and Milan Polytechnic for many years.

Translator, conference interpreter and professor of English language, she graduated in English Language and Literature at the University of Aarhus and accomplished a research PhD in Theory of Translation at the University of Milan. She has been teaching both in Italian and international universities and in corporate contexts for 15 years. This experience gave her the chance to be able to deal with students from different cultures and educational backgrounds, with the aim to make them reach a good language level for several social and professional operating contexts. Besides, she works as Project Manager for important translation assignments and interpreting projects. She released monographies on language didactics and contributed to numerous academic papers in this field.

After graduating with full marks from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, Lia Luzzatto continued her studies, exploring the fields of fashion and specialising in hardcopy and digital chromatic communication. She now works as a colour consultant in many fields, writes books, takes part in seminars and teaches. Because of its symbolic, communicative, psychological and sensory complexity, colour is a vital resource in every visual context. Lia Luzzatto lectures in Colour Theory at the Academy of Communication and the Luxury Lab in the Academy of Luxury in Milan. Writing together with Renata Pompas, whom she met attending Luigi Veronesi’s lectures in chromatology at the Academy, she has published numerous books about colour that are constantly going through reprints for publishers including Hoepli, Il Castello and Bompiani. She is a founder member of the Italian Colour Association’s Colour Group and is a member of its Presidency Council and Scientific Committee. Previously a member of the CISST – Italian Centre for Studying the History of Fabrics – and of ADI, she is currently a member of the ECD Environmental Colour Design of Buenos Aires and of the Stockholm-based Colour Study Group.

After taking her diploma at the Accademia di Comunicazione in Milan, Chiara Grandesso went on to take a Masters in Communication in Art & Design at the Royal College of Art in London. She then won a scholarship to continue pursuing her research at the Kyoto City University of Arts in Japan. Once back in Europe, she won the Parallel Prize and was subsequently invited by Philippe Starck to start working with him in his Paris office. Although she maintained a partnership with the office upon returning to Italy after this experience, she also started doing graphic design work on her own initiative. She has received acknowledgments from both the ADCI and the Padua municipal council Culture Department.

A journalist and photography critic who writes for the ViviMilano supplement to the leading national daily newspaper Corriere della Sera, Giovanni Pelloso has worked on publishing projects with Mondadori Portfolio (he was the author of the piece dedicated to Mario De Biasi, Giorgio Lotti and Angelo Cozzi), with Hachette and with Canon Italia. A co-author of the Dizionario mondiale della fotografia (Rizzoli/Contrasto, 2002), he is a contributor to the monthly magazines NPhotography and Photo Professional and is editor in chief of the long-established magazine Il Fotografo. He has held workshops and seminars about photography at the Suor Orsola Benincasa University in Naples, the Istituto Italiano di Fotografia and the Contrasto agency. His research interests focus on the theory and practice of the sociology of consumption and of advertising. Working as a contract lecturer, he has been teaching and conducting research since 2005 at the Faculty of Communication Sciences and of Entertainment at the IULM University in Milan. He has been lecturing in photography at the LAO since 2013 and is an associate researcher at the Milan Civic Aquarium.

Born in 1981, Luigi Ciuffreda studied architecture and design at the École Supérieure d’Art et de Design in Orleans and at Milan Polytechnic, where he graduated in 2006 with a specialisation in museography and exhibition design for cultural heritage. From 2005 to 2007, he worked as an expert in the subject in the Interior Design workshops at the Milan Polytechnic Faculty of Design and, from 2013 to 2017, he lectured in design and exhibition design at the Milan Academy of Communication. He now operates in a variety of permutations of the field of design: product design, retail design, interior architecture an exhibition design. His more notable recent projects include the museographical design at the Lapidary Museum of Monte Sant’Angelo and the signage for the new NAS Arena stadium in Dubai. Since 2006, he has been a consultant with Buratti Architects, where he has collaborated on projects for B&B Italia, Fontana Arte, Living Divani, Poliform, Poltrona Frau, Porro, Tecno, Lamborghini, Ducati, Husqvarna, La Perla and Gebrüder Thonet of Vienna. Along with his professional activities, he devotes some of his time to personal research into illustration and graphic design.

After his humanistic studies, Vergani trained himself as a scholar while he worked in a record shop. A brief experience in the world of design led him to become Luigi Settembrini and Francesca Sorace’s assistant in the year 2000 during their collaboration with the Cosmit for the exhibition “1951-2001, Made in Italy?”. In 2001, he founded Nowhere, the first example of a nomad exhibition space, and organised exhibitions in Milan, Paris, and Florence with this format. In 2003, he opened a permanent office in Milan, thus giving substance to his research activity in the field of contemporary art. During the same year, and until 2006, he worked as an editorial consultant for Skira. From 2007 to 2013 he was the Vice President of Startmilano, a sectorial association for the diffusion of contemporary art and culture. He has been writing about art for the newspaper Il Giorno/QN since 2009.

Fellow student of Giorgio de Renzo and Mario Ricciardi, Matteo Balocco graduated in 1998, then started working with Domino Interactive in Turin as a front-end specialist. In 2004, he won two Interactive Key Awards for the best front-end development with the websites for the Turin Book Fair and NoMartiniNoParty. In 2011, he started working with Simplicissimus Book Farm on creating a set of typographic rules for e-books and wrote a web typography handbook for Apogeo. In 2013, he was one of the people behind the conception and organization of Kerning, the first international conference held in Italy dedicated to typography for the web, and became a member of the visual design thematic committee of experts for the ADI Design Index (until 2015). At the same time, he also started working with Reply and Bitmama as a user experience designer on financial technology projects. In 2015, he launched Hangar, a format for workshops in good digital communication practices, and in 2016 he became Product Manager with TOK.tv, an American digital services company.