Contributor

My first step into the nautical industry was 18 years ago when, during my Interior Design course, I took the opportunity to intern for a company that fitted out public spaces aboard large cruise ships. "What is the difference between a large ship and a house?" It was this very question that drove me to seek out answers and step into a world that was completely new to me.

Joni Baboci is an architect, planner, knowledge-seeker and all-around urban enthusiast. He is currently the senior advisor for urban planning to the Mayor of Tirana. He has previously led the city's urban planning and development department as well as a governmental planning start-up dealing with national and regional strategic planning. Joni has executed planning, design & development projects at different scales on national and local levels. He has consulted on urbanism and planning for various cultural and multilateral institutions.

Francesca Balena Arista is an architect, a PhD in industrial design, and a member of the Italian Association of Design Historians. She teaches at the Politecnico di Milano’s School of Design, and at NABA (Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti) in Milan.

Her monograph Poltronova Backstage: Archizoom Sottsass and Superstudio. The Radical Era 1962-1972, was published by Fortino Editions Miami.

Mattia Balsamini (1987, Italy) is a photographer. He began his studies at the Brooks

Institute of California, graduating with an Honourable Mention in 2011. He worked as a studio assistant and archivist at David LaChapelle’s studio in 2010.

Born in Tokyo in 1957. Graduated from the Cooper Union. Started working for Arata Isozaki & Associates in 1982. Founded Shigeru Ban Architects in 1985. Became consultant to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in 1995. Established the NGO, Voluntary Architects' Network (VAN) in the same year to support disaster relief. Selected works include Centre Pompidou- Metz, Oita Prefecture Art Museum, Mt. Fuji World Heritage Centre, Shizuoka, Musical Complex of La Seine Musicale, and Swatch Omega Headquarters.

Italian by birth, Brazilian by choice, she has always gone to and fro between both countries.  She took her degree from the Faculty of Architecture at the University of di São Paulo in Brazil in 1979,  obtaining degree equivalency from the Polytechnic of Milan in 1985.

Valia Barriello, architect and Ph.D. in Design, works professionally in Milan. She combines architectural planning with constant research on design and product through writing, university collaboration and curating exhibitions. From 2011 to 2015 she directed the design column for Artribune. He has collaborated with a number of design publications, including: Living, Domus, Artribune, Artemest, The House in Order, Exibart. 

Silvia Anna Barrilà is a freelance journalist and consultant. She has covered the art market and collecting for the newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore since 2008, and has taught the Masters Managing Art and Cultural Heritage course at the  24 Ore Business School since 2011. She co-founded Collective, an association of Italian collectors, set up to support the art system in Italy, and is responsible for the content of its dedicated website. She has been working on her Contemporary Art Galleries project, a platform that collects interviews with contemporary art gallerists, since 2015.

Laura Barsottini (Milan, 1964) is a freelance professional journalist with 33 years’ experience with a number of Mondadori publications (from Sorrisi and Canzoni to Icon Design, by way of Donna Moderna, Panorama, CasaFacile and Cosmopolitan) and collaborations with daily newspapers behind her, experiences that have enabled her to see publishing products from the inside, with all their pros and cons.

Yves Béhar, Founder and CEO of fuseproject, is a designer and entrepreneur who believes that integrated product, brand and experience design are the cornerstones of any business. Béhar has pioneered design as a force for positive social and environmental change. 

His humanitarian work includes the One Laptop Per Child and See Better to Learn Better, which has distributed 6 million free corrective eyeglasses to schoolchildren in Mexico for the last 10 years. He received the INDEX Award for these projects, making him the only designer to have received the award twice. 

After graduating from the Cherson Teachers’ Training College in Ukraine, Iryna attended the Faculty of Spatial Design at the British High School of Art and Design. Since 2005 she has worked as an interior designer and decorator. The Italian manufacturers Milano Bedding have produced one of her designs, the Booklet ottoman, for more than ten years. Iryna has been the editor of Salon Magazine Azerbaijan and assistant editor of the Ukrainian magazine Domus Design.

Teresa Bellemo deals with communication and works for Rivista Studio. She has directed Cosebelle magazine and writes for several online and print magazines, such as Icon Design and Living Corriere. She lives in Milan.

Porzia Bergamasco is a journalist, critic, curator and teacher, specialising in design and architecture, communication and contemporary aesthetic phenomena. With a degree in Modern Literature, her career began in the mid-80s in Bari, her native city, where she was involved with information, cultural and regional policy, architecture, design and contemporary art, contributing to magazines and working as a press officer for international events and festivals. She lived in Rome from 1991 to 1999, where she also worked in television, before moving to Milan, where she is the curator of

Design critic, freelance journalist and creative strategy consultant, Anne-France Berthelon is an adept of crossovers, versatility, travels, ideas, encounters and conversations. She has created knitting patterns for fashion magazines while studying Languages and found herself working as a freelance copywriter in the last golden years of advertising before becoming a trends & strategy analyst for fashion offices. Her passion for design and its global ecosystem has made her a regular contributor to design publications such as Ideat, Libération, The Good Life and DAMN.

Tulga Beyerle (b. 1964, Vienna) has been director of the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (MKG) since 1 December 2018. In keeping with the goal of museums of applied and decorative arts everywhere to provide inspiration for the best in design both in the present and future, Beyerle strives to position MKG as a place of myriad possibilities and a platform for discourse and negotiation at the highest level and yet without excluding any members of society.