The Designer

Design problems are rarely just design problems.

I’m a product designer for industry. Not consumer apps or marketing sites — HMI, enterprise tools, and the control software that sits between a person and a machine that can cost them a shift if it lies to them. The title is usually some version of lead UX/UI designer and product owner; the real job is making complex, high-stakes work legible to the people doing it.

I’ve spent eight years in industrial settings designing interfaces for work that matters — places where a confusing screen isn’t an annoyance, it’s a stopped production line. Someone misreads a value, a workflow stalls, a decision gets delayed.

That’s been the shape of the whole career, not a phase of it. I’ve led design teams and carried products as their owner, so the responsibility has always run past the screens: the research behind them, the decisions between competing options, and the case for why a thing should exist at all. Industry is unglamorous and specific, and I’ve come to prefer it — the constraints are real, the users are experts at their own jobs, and the work has consequences you can measure on a floor.

Industrial interfaces have their own rules, and most designers never learn them. An operator isn’t a customer to be delighted — they’re an expert under time pressure who needs one obvious next action, not a tour. A plant has no single user: the person at the machine, the manager over the floor, and the service team behind both need opposite things from the same system. Screens have to survive gloves, glare, and the fact that a wrong reading can stop a line or hurt someone. I’ve been in it long enough to design for that by default, in the vocabulary the people who buy it actually use.

Most of my work is fixing exactly that: taking dense, technical interfaces and making them clear, reliable, and honest about what’s happening underneath — not through grand redesign visions, but by sitting next to the people who use them until I understand what they actually need. Those problems are tangled in how teams communicate, and in what got inherited and never questioned. I like working in that mess. I’m good at it.

The method holds whatever the sector. I start by going to where the work happens and watching it, because the stated problem is almost never the real one — the real one is usually upstream, in a workflow, a handoff, or a decision nobody has revisited in years. I design in cycles and test with the people who’ll actually use the thing. I think in systems rather than screens, so what I hand over is a design system a team can extend, not a pile of one-off layouts. And I work close enough to the front-end to know what I’m asking developers to build — I design in Figma, and I read and write the code it becomes.

Most of it ships under other people’s brands — platforms and machine interfaces deployed across four sectors and 40+ countries.

That’s the deal I’ve made with this work, and it suits me. I’m not building a name on top of other people’s products; I’m making their products work, and the credit stays with them. For a company hiring me, that’s the point — years spent designing things that ship under a brand that isn’t mine, held to that brand’s standards, without needing my signature on the result. Discretion is part of the craft, not a limit on it.

When I can show the work, it looks like this. Strato is a control room for a CNC plant I scoped and built end-to-end — my own concept, taken from a blank brief to a product you can click through today. Maestro Connect is SCM Group’s industrial-IoT platform, rebuilt from a wall of raw numbers into a tool woodworking shops run production on, then put in their pocket as a mobile companion. Tescam moved Bridgestone’s tire-testing off scattered spreadsheets onto one auditable record. And for IFIN Sistemi the deliverable wasn’t a screen at all — it was a development process, designed across three departments that each had their own. Most of the rest I can describe but not show.

I’m based in Venice and work with teams anywhere; the work has never much cared where I sit. Studios bring me in for white-label overflow — senior product design and production front-end under their own brand — and companies bring me in to own a problem end-to-end. Either way, what I’m after is the same thing I’ve always been after: the confusing, high-stakes, inherited mess between a person and the system they have to operate, and the chance to make it honest.

None of that is a menu of services. It’s the range I’ve had to build to take an ambiguous industrial brief from a first conversation to something a team can ship — the throughline under everything below.