About

Practice at a glance

Tools, methods, and learning experiences that help people develop new capabilities. The path runs from drawing and cinema through interface and service design to game design, XR, and agentic workflows. A family background in technical drawing and industry shaped the early interests; professional practice developed through cultural studies, visual design, commercial projects, and teaching. Current work combines design direction with hands-on prototyping, mentoring at the Apple Developer Academy, and teaching at Federico II. Start a conversation about design, research, or education.

How the practice developed

Drawing, play, and early influences

Comics, films, and video games shaped an early interest in how images, sequences, and space construct experience. Francesco Perchiazzi grew up in a working family where technical drawing and education were part of everyday life. His mother was an elementary school teacher. His grandfather drafted aero-naval systems for propeller aircraft and ships. His uncle trained as an industrial designer at Olivetti in the 1960s, then worked as an external consultant across industries. His father worked as draftsman at Aeritalia and CIRA, through the airport as an operational system, where airspace, radar, and onboard interfaces translated movement into information. Aviation offered an early view of design: the computation of space, the readability of systems, the relationship between human perception and machines.

A CAD workstation powered by an Intel 486 DX2 at 66 MHz was also running games, military flight simulators. Flight simulators offered a way to explore computing, flight, and systems through direct interaction.

Before manga, there were arcades. Every new place on holiday meant locating the local arcade first. The compulsion was not about playing. It was about entering systems, reading their internal logic, testing their edges. At fifteen, Ghost in the Shell (Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 film, adapted from Masamune Shirow’s manga) prompted questions about the body, memory, and identity within technological systems. The same question that was already inside the flight simulators, in a different form. At seventeen, that interest led to drawing classes. Drawing comics became a way to explore how images and sequences give structure to imagined spaces.

Alongside professional design work, a personal comics practice continues through drawing and experiments with sequential storytelling. The comic tools in the Lab also grow from this practice, connecting page composition, visual rhythm, and tool building.

From visual culture to design

An interest in inhabiting and understanding systems gradually developed into interface design and, later, spatial design research. The first contact with something that could be called immersive came through an internship at Digigraf, which included studying an example of interactive digital heritage: the Museo Narrante del Santuario di Hera Argiva at Paestum. In parallel, self-published fanzines and live sketch work at events including Napoli Comicon were testing the same question in a different register: how do images and space construct meaning in the mind of a viewer? That research later became a master’s degree thesis, and eventually a published book: Fare cinema disegnato (La Torre Editrice, 2012), an experimental study of animated film production through the lens of Basic Design principles.

That question demanded a wide formation before a narrow one. A degree in Beni Culturali at the University of Naples covered art history, architectural history, museology, archaeology, ancient history, business economics, and theatre and cinema studies, the full perimeter of culture as spatial practice. A Master’s degree at La Sapienza in Rome, Forms and Techniques of Performance (Cinema, Theatre, Television), shifted the focus from space to the human being inside it: how people receive, interpret, and embody mediated experience. Postgraduate studies at SPD, Scuola Politecnica di Design, in Milan, founded by Nino Di Salvatore on the principles of Gestalt psychology and the science of vision, with Bruno Munari among its faculty, embody what Pietro Nunziante, writing on Roberto Mango’s legacy at the Faculty of Architecture in Naples, calls design come imparare a pensare: design as learning to think. For a broader lineage of systemic design, see Tomás Maldonado’s legacy in systems-thinking and design theory. That formation gave the question its first technical frame.

Interfaces and professional practice

In 2011, the iPhone forced a reckoning. Companies that had never thought about software interfaces suddenly needed people who could design them. There was no established pipeline, no curriculum, no job title everyone agreed on. A generation of graphic designers found themselves converted into UI designers by circumstance, learning iOS, Windows Phone, Android, and intranet systems on the job, without a map. For Perchiazzi, this transition led to further study of interaction design, including training under Bruce Tognazzini at the Nielsen Norman Group in Atlanta. That training connected practical interface work with a more systematic understanding of perception and interaction.

Tools, teaching, and current practice

AI agents are a later iteration of the same structure. The 486 DX2 removed the distance between spatial thinking and its representation: a twelve-year-old could finally place objects in simulated space without knowing how the engine worked. Agentic workflows do the same thing at a different level of abstraction: implementation becomes more accessible, leaving more room to frame a problem, test an idea, and decide what is worth building. What changes is not the question. What changes is how quickly you can test whether your answer holds.

From Atlanta, the trajectory became clearer. Interface design gradually expanded into extended reality and game design. A public selection at the Apple Developer Academy (Passion-Powered Students!) gave that research a place to take form in practice: how digital systems move from flat screens into inhabitable space, how designers learn to think about the body before the code. Teaching continued later at the University of Naples Federico II.

The model for this discipline is not Silicon Valley. It is Adriano Olivetti’s Italy: the idea that technology is not separable from the culture, education, and community that produces and inhabits it. That a company and a community are not opposites. That the most durable design work happens at the intersection of both.

Current work spans Design, Research, Education, and Capability Building: mentoring at the Apple Developer Academy, teaching at Federico II, developing spatial design tools, and exploring agentic workflows. The aim is to develop methods and tools that people can continue using and adapting independently.