Why the website

This one’s easy. I needed a place to create a systemic view of the aspects of my job I’m more passionate about. I worked in content and experience design for more than 25 years, but, if anything, that’s become a constraint, as I’ve found myself working at the intersection of information and solutions architecture, teams and innovation for too many years – which seems to be unusual. Add to that an early interest in personal data, a nostalgic fondness for the early web standards and a deep distrust for closed platforms, an enduring fascination for the concept of digital identity and a ‘eureka’ moment when I came across the first attempts at decentralising identity through personal data stores – and what do you get?

The core of what gets me back to work in digital even when the outlook on digital is pretty bleak. Something that’s only seemingly disjointed: humans, their characteristics, information they need, the way it can be provided it to them, the harms you can cause if you get any of the above wrong.

Why the name

I hate naming things. I have an approach for when I need to do it at work, but left to my own devices I will resort to cramming all the meaning I can muster into as little letters as possible. So, when it came to title the “song about myself”, I chose to cram as many multitudes as possible in one word, and I ended up including these :

• university studies in linguistics-adjacient subjects (romance philology, history of the Italian language)
• amateur keenness in semantics and epistemology (told you, I’m a sucker for meaning)
• a compulsive tendency of reducing complexity within frameworks
• a fruitful stint as a super-heavyweight powerlifter
• a current and way more injury-prone attempt at being a weightlifter (Olympics-style of WL) past the ripe age of 50 (hope springs eternal, but at least I stopped recording every training session on Instagram)
• an unordinate love for good food, and a past as a professional bread and pastry baker, proudly rising the ranks in one of the best bakeries in the Netherlands
• an amount of patience that’s inversely proportional to my body mass when it comes to the oversimplified (or overcomplicated) discourse about fat, nutrition and their connection to health, and to the amount of time I spent educating myself on matters of nutrition science.

Other things like my love for Japanese weaponry and martial arts or my music nerdiness might pop out at times. Or I can be convinced to talk about them over a good glass of Italian wine (French if I’m feeling less chauvinistic).