The Short Version

I'm an information architect and UX practitioner and scholar. I've been working as an ICT professional since 1989, I hold a MA in Architecture and Industrial Design and I have been practicing information architecture since 1999. I'm now working with FatDUX, a leading UX firm based in Copenhagen and with offices in Los Angeles, Berlin, Krakow, and London, and pursuing a PhD in Legal Informatics with a focus in IA and UX for online access to large historical and juridical collections. I serve on the Board of Directors of the Information Architecture Institute, chair the Italian IA Summit, I'm a founding member of the European IA Network, I coordinate REG-iA, the Research & Education Group in IA, and finally I'm an Associate Editor for the Journal of Information Architecture.

The Long Version

I started working as a network administrator on big iron at the end of the Eighties, but my formal background is that of a designer: I hold a Master Degree in Architecture and Industrial Design from the Politecnico di Milano, Italy, where I graduated magna cum laude in 1995. My dissertation dealt with chaos theories and morphogenetic design of sacred spaces, and used the then-cutting-edge Doom Engine to allow architectural walk-through of places such as the archetypical Noh theater, a romanic Church in Sardinia, Italy, the Tholos of Atreus in Greece, and the circle of stones of Stonehenge, England. I would have used the Ultima Underworld 3D engine anytime, though. This work was co-authored by Dario Ferracin and we spent a whole spring rendering 3D models in 3D Studio and assembling evolutionary animations.

After my degree I served my Alma as a teaching assistant in the field of generative and process design for a couple of years, and I helped setup one of the first online university labs for students in years when Italy was happily speeding along on 2400 modems. But I had found a way to reconcile my different professional and academic expertise: as a result, but exactly how is still a little obscure to me, I also got involved with Linux and Free Software and moved into designing web sites and web servers.

Around 1999 I found out there were strange men and women doing what I was doing, structured web design. They were coming from the most diverse backgrounds but they all called themselves information architects, and it was Joliet Jake seeing the light for me. I worked as a freelance for a while and then co-founded a company, exea, with the idea of bringing SMEs into the information revolution and onto the Internet. When it became clear that it wasn't happening for the time being, at least not for us or not at the pace we thought, I went solo again and decided it was time for me to get back to scholarly works. I enrolled as a PhD candidate first at the Department of History and Informatics then at CIRSFID, the Department of Legal Informatics and Philosophy of Law, University of Bologna, where my research field is information architecture and user experience design for digital libraries and historical and juridical databases. Since CIRSFID deploys actual applications I still spend a fair amount of time managing, code-monkeying, and taking care of the sys-admin side of things, like I did in the good ole days. I write my XHTML / CSS, hack my PHP / SQL, design my layouts, and fsck my RAIDs.

I regularly speak at conferences in Italy, Europe and the US, and I'm currently a member of the Board of Directors of the Information Architecture Institute, after serving one year on the Board of Advisors as well. In January 2008 I started what is now REG-iA, the Research & Education Group in Information Architecture, an academic group which is now currently quite busy publishing the very first peer-reviewed Journal of Information Architecture and working towards an integrated IA curriculum framework, and I'm one of the founders of the EuroIA Network Initiative, an ongoing effort to connect the IA national communities in Europe. If that wasn't enough, I chair the Italian Information Architecture Summit.

Since me and the family have been traveling through the Nordic Countries since 1994, five years ago we decided it was time to get a feel of how it is to be real Svenssons and since then we've been spending part of the year in Sweden, where the Department of Informatics at JIBS in Jönköping was kind enough to show some interest in what I'm doing.

I speak Italian and English (although some may beg to differ on that last one) and I'm currently quite busy trying to handle Svenska. I'm married with Cristina, and the father of now-nine-years-old Gaia.

Finally, I'm also the only Italian who actually went and sued Microsoft (but I was younger then and I had accomplices).