HI, I am Massimo Curatella.
I am a Strategic Designer and a Facilitator.
I write about design, education, facilitation, and Systems Thinking.
Some highlights from my website curatella.com:
- One Year Writing: 30 Lessons Learned in 30 Days. This is the beginning of my challenge to publish 30 atomic essays in 30 days.
- Writing Half a Million words in One Year. Today is the day I am writing for my 365th day in a row, for a total of half a million words.
- The habit of building habits
- Notes. A growing collection of notes, reflections, and connections.
- My notes about Systems Thinking
- All articles about Design
- All articles about Facilitation
- All articles about Writing
- All articles about Systems Thinking
Read My Latest Articles
- 60 Times 60. Refining my daily publishing strategy
I am celebrating my 60th daily publishing in a row, but I am not satisfied with my long-term publishing strategy. - The Note-Taking Nouvelle Vague
In the world of P tools, there is a tsunami of new software applications to manage note-taking and note-making - Artificial Intelligences are children to be educated
What’s the boundary between the usefulness of the suggestions that you receive and the information you have to provide to get them? - Creativity preparation rituals: infallible!
Prime your brain with the ritual of preparation. Nothing can stop you when you’re cleaning up your mind and your environment to start doing creative work. - Find and give meaning
Find your answers, build on top of what others have already learned, and experiment by minimizing risks while maximizing the learning. - Rebranding the obvious
Why calling something already existing, known, and named with another name? - How to be a Systems Thinker: simple steps
Being a better Systems Thinker is all nice and good but how do you manage to do it in our chaotic lives? - Celebratory rituals define yourself
Questioning the deep motives behind your celebration shatters your identity from the foundations. It’s a disruptive act to redefine yourself. - Minimize unintended consequences by thinking in systems
When you obtain effects you didn’t want and you did not expect, following your actions, you are experiencing unintended consequences. - Keep on writing
50 daily blog posts published. Let’s do another 50. - A Zettelkasten as a tool for thinking
Capture information into well-written and well-connected notes. Add them to your Zettelkasten to make it grow. It will become your favorite thinking tool. - Question time
Will I have the patience and the persistence to see what will emerge from my consistency? - Planning revisions to prepare for reflection
In a moment of reflection, I am combining two ideas to enhance my creative workflow. - Go walk yourself
You have to learn when to write and when to do something else. - Grow exponentially by compounding incrementally
Exploit exponentials in anything that you do, every single day of your life. The compounded effect will lead you to unthinkable achievements. - A Crazy year. Of growth and fear. 2020 retrospective.
A year of walking, thinking, writing, reflecting, challenging, growing, meeting, facilitating, designing, and hope. - Communication without context is meaningless
Clarify the receiver’s mind about the message you want to convey. Then communicate your content. - Choose your own stories, wisely
You’ll always have stories to tell and stories to listen to. Which stories we believe in is what our reality is going to be. Choose wisely. - Usability Heuristics as collective design experience
Use designers’ shared experience to improve your User Interfaces: apply the most useful Usability Heuristics to design your software better. - Creative technique: 1-2-3
First: set the problem; two: develop possibilities; three, implement, test, and iterate. Four: break the rules. - Creative technique: list ideas following a prompt
When you’re stuck and don’t know where to start from, take a partner and play to list their ideas following a clear and concise starting question. - Solve problems better: bottom-up and top-down
Combine the direct problem-solving approach with creative exploration to find novel and useful solutions. - Stop. And reflect.
You cannot always be in the flow. Take periodic breaks to evaluate your achievements in retrospective to plan the next move. - Design methods, how to avoid reinventing everything
Study, research, and adapt the best design process for the context of the problem you want to solve. And design solutions that are effective, efficient, and pleasurable. - Constrain your creativity to make it easy
Having a format to follow, even when flexible and loose, gives the quick sprint of taking care of the topic without worrying about the structure. It gives pace and logical flow. - Test your solutions before your users
The design process requires competence, focus, and hard work. Do not risk to create fragile solutions by skipping systematic testing of your designs. Plan and execute to stress your solutions intentionally in extreme cases. You will develop robust tools with a higher chance of surviving in the real world. - Writing about writing about writing
Write daily: a lot, a little, but write. Write free-flowing or with intentions, but write. Collect, organize, and connect, but write. Review, revise, and publish, but write! - What to write when you don’t know what to write
If you find yourself in the situation of not knowing what to write you can leverage on your drafts, your notes or on your creative toolbox. - Expert? Show up, provide value and we’ll see.
Practice, study, and be prepared to show up and provide value with your expertise. Welcome to the era of the Knowledge Entrepreneur. - Be prepared for anything
It doesn’t matter if you can foresee future, be mindful in preparing yourself always beyond the expected, to be ready for the unknowable. - The habit of building habits
You choose to be who you are by repeatedly doing what you decide to do, consistently, continuously. - Writing compounds despite everything
Write every day. Regardless of successes and failures, you will grow, day in, day out. - If only I could be ten, again
Write every day in your diary and keep it. You’ll be ten forever. - Write daily to enhance your reality
Write to have a richer picture of your world, understand it better, and live it better. - Don’t lose your mind. Back it up
While waiting to upload your physical brain, do yourself a favor, backup your digital documents now. And check if it worked. - Do it small to do it better
Big but never or small but now? Lower the bar. Reduce expectations. Make yourself impossible to fail. Do it small. - Write daily to become a better manager
Write daily, reflect on your day, and plan your tomorrows. You will become a better manager in any field of your life, personal and professional. - Practice transcribing your thoughts to become an effective communicator
Transcribe your thoughts, frequently and intensely. You will become a better thinker and a better communicator. - Type more, type faster, type better
Writing is also physical performance, when typing, train yourself to use all fingers without looking at the keyboard. - Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Book review
The best book on humanity I’ve read so far: this book makes me feel bad. - Facilitate growth by tracking habits
If you don’t measure it, you cannot learn from it. Measure your behaviors to steer towards your positive, incremental, compounded growth. - Why asking questions?
Why asking questions? What is the most potent exploration and adventure tool in the world if not to ask a question? - Publish text as digital text, not images
Be a responsible Internet Citizen: publish content as digital text to make it usable and accessible. - Automate repetitive tasks
Don’t waste your time on tasks that software can do for you, automate repetitive tasks, and gain time to write (or to sleep if you want). - Writing is a process
Writing is never just writing. Refine your word production workflows to support your habit-making approach or you will just be a hamster on a wheel. - Be smart, let it go
Write and share your ideas now. Reflect on the waves they have made. It’s the only way to be smarter. - Creativity makes you happy
Imagining new and better futures, visualizing conceptual connections, and writing them, you will be happier. - Writing is like drinking coffee
Overcoming the initial friction of starting leads to habits: drinking coffee and writing daily. Choose wisely. - Walking generates ideas
The more you walk, the more you have ideas. - Writing reduces your jargon and slang
Practice writing and recording your thoughts to talk better and to write in a cleaner and more understandable way. Capisc’? - Dissolve your distractions
Writing helps to improve your focused and intentional productivity by eliminating waste and procrastination. - Writing sets the focus on yourself
Writing is focusing on yourself, making you more objective and more self-aware. - Writing makes you a better observer
Learn to become a better observer by writing, consistently, about what you notice. - Writing improves your memory
You remember better what you have written. Connect your brain to a more vivid past. Leverage on your rich memories: write them down. - Connect ideas now
Information hoarding is too easy. Capture and connect your new ideas now. There’s no other time to do it. - Writing builds your networks
Extrovert or introvert? Doesn’t matter. make your thoughts visible, you’ll grow your network. - Be less ambitious, be more consistent
Lower the bar and reduce expectations. Make your work easy to be done so that you cannot miss it. - Creative Loneliness
I can be creative when alone. Don’t let your time alone be wasted. Use it to write. - Write a lot to write well
Your first million words are the worst. Put in the repetitions and your writing will improve. - Writing is Thinking
Writing is thinking and if you cannot think clearly you cannot write.
Discover My Passions
books collective intelligence communication complexity creativity critical thinking design design thinking education educational games facilitation facilitation methods future thinking game design how instructional design interaction design networked thinking networks newsletter note-taking notes online publishing personal development personal knowledge management planning podcasts poetry problem-solving professional development research reviews Ship 30 for 30 speculative design strategic design sustainability systemic design systems thinking thinking user interface design UX Design what why writing zettelkasten
Massimo Curatella
I am a Senior Experience Designer, a Facilitator, a Trainer, and an Educator.
I work as a Senior Strategic Designer in the fields of Service Design, UX Design, Interaction Design, User Research, User Interface Design, Usability Testing and managing small remote groups of designers and developers.
I the last 25 years I have been designing, developing, writing, speaking and teaching about digital technologies.
I am expanding my online and live Facilitation services to cover: Collective Intelligence Design, Systems Practice and Systems Change.
I aim at improving the well-being of people and the planet while promoting the sustainable adoption of new technologies and co-designing ecosystem-centered solutions. I facilitate learning processes by simplifying the complex.
I believe in Systems Thinking, Critical Thinking and Design Thinking and I feel I have never learnt enough about being more effective and efficient with those disciplines.
I am writing about my experience on this blog. Something I wanted to do for more than 20 years.
You can subscribe for my newsletter to receive updates on my work and my writings.
I am based in Rome, Italy. Although I can travel I would prefer remote work.
These are some people inspiring me.