I'm a designer, researcher, baker, and educator. I'm completing practice-led doctoral research at Aalto University on symbiotic conviviality: ways of making that work with-in the agencies of materials, ecologies, and more-than-human others, toward what I call co-existing survivals.
How I got here
I studied industrial design at Politecnico di Milano, with a year at UIAH Helsinki and ABK Stuttgart through the Master of European Design programme. The MSc thesis was a rescue boat, a polyvalent vessel for medical emergencies on water, building on my long experience as a Red Cross volunteer.
In 2012, I co-founded Studio Dossofiorito with Livia Rossi. We made objects across furniture and interior, plants and gardens, food and tableware, and design workshops for children, held together by a performative, relational attitude where objects acted as vehicles for thought. Our works circulated internationally in galleries and fairs. That work led me to a place I keep returning to: the recognition that design can make room for the living world, decentring the human to acknowledge the agencies of plants, materials, and ecologies.
Moving to Finland in 2018, I taught Experimental Design at Aalto, BA and MA, and then the Glass Challenge and Glass Summer School as Designer in Residence, and I also worked with Julia Lohmann at the Department of Seaweed.
In 2020, I opened Panicuocoli, an organic sourdough bakery in Helsinki, operating it as a business, a research site, and a methodology for my doctoral research, leading to years of daily bread-making with locally sourced grains and sourdough cultures, while working with farmers and adapting to what each harvest brought.
What drives the work now
The bakery closed in 2024 because it became financially and personally unsustainable. The bread was great (and people still stop me in the street to ask if I bake somewhere now), yet the operations and aligning the rhythms of the bread with those of personal life were not. This tension between the desire for convivial practice and the economic reality, between making-with and making-a-living, is strong and real. The article-based dissertation I am working on (tentatively Symbiotic conviviality for co-existing survivals) emerges from those four years of practice, articulating four contributions: acknowledgement as epistemic practice, emergent prototyping, symbiotic conviviality, and relational form. This tension is also why I'm building BakeryOS: so that small sourdough bakeries built on care and attentiveness can focus on their craft and on delivering outstanding bread, rather than burning out on day-to-day management.
Education
- MBA, International School of Business, Paris (2010)
- MSc Industrial Design, Politecnico di Milano (2007)
- Master of European Design, UIAH Helsinki & ABK Stuttgart (2004–2005)
- BSc Industrial Design, Politecnico di Milano (2004)