Blog
Ink, Stone, Brush, Paper and Tea
This weekend I returned to calligraphy after months away. Grinding ink on stone offers a welcome relief from screens. In contrast to the numbness of touching glass on a smartphone, you feel the scent of the ink forming, the sound and feeling of friction rubbing on the inkstone, applying soft
London Design Festival
I was the Head of Content & Digital of London Design Festival (LDF), overseeing the editions 2021, 2022 and 2023. Founded in 2003, London Design Festival celebrates and promotes the city as a design capital on the global stage and is one of the world's leading design events.
Moving at human speed
You can tell that September was the busiest time at work when all I could manage to write about was putting tomatoes on handmade ceramic plates and sharing daily Instagram Stories about preparing matcha (抹茶, Japanese powdered green tea) in a proper teabowl using a bamboo whisk. Truth is, these
Turning a banal conference badge into a collectible item
Throwback to 2010 when I was leading marketing and communications at the PICNIC Festival in Amsterdam during the day, and the Conference Director of Frontiers of Interaction in Rome at night. The first decade of the 2000s had been a fervent period for innovative media-tech-creativity conferences to rise and refresh
Tea Ensō
This morning I did a sloppy job at transferring new matcha tea from its original container onto a tea caddy using a sift that was wider than the opening of the caddy.
WIP: new website
I moved my website gchicco.com (this one!) to a new platform (Ghost) and I’m in the process of transferring content from the old version. It contained articles, work news and photos spanning over 15 years… tempus fugit! Reviewing all that content is proving to be quite cathartic and
Third-wave coffee oasis in Milan
Onest Milano, a cafe-osasis in Italy, oscillates between serving specialty coffee during the day and wine in the evenings, both accompanied by delicate good food. They pride themselves in putting sustainability and traceability at the top of their offering.
With my own two hands
Workweeks have been pretty intense so I spent the weekend recharging. I finally picked up the pots and cups I made over the last couple of months at Tokobo Pottery. They are raw and unrefined, even ugly. But you know what? Tea and coffee taste better in them just because
A box of wonders
I have a box full of postcards that I’ve collected over the years. The oldest are from 1992, from a Pink Floyd special edition boxset I loved. Many are from when I moved to Europe in the early 2000s. I’ve picked them up during work trips, holidays, and
A happy birthday in lockdown
For my birthdays, I like to bring together friends from different walks of (my) life to break bread (and drink wine!). This year eating together was not an option, as I found myself in lockdown like many, many others. I had been self-isolating for the previous two months without having
Virtual events need to break the fourth wall
When COVID-19 pulled the rug from under event organisers’ feet, forcing them to postpone or cancel, they scrambled to find new experiences that would fill up the void. Naturally, the quickest way to replace them was through live-streaming sessions on Zoom, Instagram Live, YouTube, etc. Virtual events can be great
Endings Summit at Techfestival 2019
In September 2019, I co-curated the Endings Summit at Techfestival in Copenhagen, an event focused on designing better endings for products, services, relationships, and life. I was also the producer and host of the Studio Stage and official Techfestival podcast. The third edition of Techfestival took place 5-7 September 2019