Davide Casali = Folletto Malefico: Hybrid Interaction Designer = Design × Psychology × Technology / Simplicity × Complexity

About

I’m Davide Casali, also known as Folletto Malefico, an hybrid interaction designer from Italy.

Why “hybrid”, you ask? Well, that’s because I think I’ve got a kind of intelligence that’s horizontal: while I often go in depth inside disciplines, I more often find myself connecting the dots between them.

Connecting the dots.
I love doing it.

Biography

It will be quite detailed: skip this part if you aren’t reeeeeally interested about me. ;)

It was a Commodore 64 with a tape drive. No floppies. You had to wait, and that’s a lot of time if you’re an hyperactive kid.

My analytic mind started showing at a very young age, when my parents thought I would be an architect since I drew maps, plans and I loved looking at construction works around Milan. But then one summer when I was nine years old I was looking for something different from Lego and Commodore 64 games and I found in my parent’s library a book about… Commodore BASIC.

After that I tried many languages by myself: from Basic to Pascal to 4DOS batch scripts to C… but then one day I found Visual Basic, and I started making small softwares, because with that the UI was “good enough and simple enough”. I created a brand called ArcaneWooD and on Geocities (RIP) I released many Windows applications, one of them was even quite popular: a nag windows killer, NagBlast (useful both for nagware and websites popups, quite popular at that time). With this experience I understood one important thing: the UI is very important.

I grew in sync with internet.

The web experience was great because I wasn’t so good at that time, but also the whole web wasn’t so good too. In hindsight, I grew in sync with internet: every time something new appeared, I learnt it. It was great also because to develop, alone, a website you need to exercise three very different skills: development, visual design and interaction design. Surely there are even more, but those were my interests.

To give a fast insight about me I often say that when I had to choose my university faculty I was unsure between Psychology and Computer Science. I chose the latter just because “I already knew most of the courses”. I would have a lot of free time and an easy time in looking for a job, while the professional growth in psychology is quite slow.

I think that “The Psychology of Everyday Things” is a “book of choices”: if you spend all the time reading it saying “I do that!”, well, probably that’s a good index about your interaction design attitude. Notice that it’s different of saying “I knew that!” all the time. Anybody knows that VCRs are badly designed, but not many think on how they could be done right… every time they see one.

Like many people like me, the turning point was Norman’s book “The Psychology of Everyday Things” (or “La caffettiera del masochista”  - “The masochist’s percolator coffee maker” in Italian, I know, that’s a bad translation). The most important thing about that book was that it showed me that I could do that: the interaction designer role existed and it wasn’t some set of skills found inside other professions.

Even better, it was a profession with a very high level of hybridization between disciplines: cognitive psychology, visual design, interaction design and technology.

Connecting the dots.
Again.

That’s whi after the BSc in Computer Science I choose a MSc in Computer Science and Psychology, in my university that was the nearest thing to interaction design.

My skills

From a professional point of view, I’m at the crossroad between Development, Psychology and Art Direction – with different balances between them – and that’s well synthesized in my approach at Interaction Design.

I think that my skills derives from three characterial traits: curiosity, synthesis and pragmatism.

Myself

I’m probably the least indicated person to tell something about me but that’s all I’ve got now. ;) I’m a calm and reflexive person, but with strong ideas and willing to express them. That’s why I think that a good dialogue is important.

I’m really dedicated to my own self improvement, both as a professional and as a human being, both mentally and physically.

I love to be surrounded by smart people with also a similar focus on self improvement. I think that failing is important, but only if you are able to learn from it.

I love to teach, to explain things and make people improving. I think that it’s one of the most satisfying experiences in life.

I love to synthesize and abstract things, but the final objective is to make things easier to understand and to communicate. The synthesis is the first step. The second step is understanding the complexity behind the elegant nature of the synthesis.

~

Now, as a prize for reading through all of this, why don’t you check my portfolio? ;)