Tangible turns 20

I have been contemplating this milestone for months, feeling the anniversary approaching, knowing that the time to write this blog post would come, and yet it's difficult to gather thoughts in a few lines now.

Beyond a completely different digital landscape, 2004, the year I signed in front of the notary to found this company, is also the year of the famous Stanca Law, the first to regulate accessibility for public administration websites, and finally, also the year when “Emotional Design” by Donald Norman* was published, a text that, together with “The Design of Everyday Things,” had an enormous influence on the design discipline. Usability, accessibility, and design that is useful and memorable for people: I dedicated my thesis to these concepts that year, and they were the ideas with which this journey began.

If I told you that I had a vision and the future of this company was clear to me, I would be lying. However, today, looking back and trying to connect the dots, a trajectory becomes apparent (things often make more sense in hindsight, don't they?).

The first ten years helped us define our offer deeply, our way of designing, and consolidating the partners and the basic structure of the company. During these years, we strengthened our research, UX, and UI design skills, blending them with the agile and lean practices absorbed by our development partners, creating the foundations of our way of working.

The second ten years were those in which to evolve services and organization, and above all, to mature awareness of our purpose. We broadened our perspective both strategically and in terms of services and processes, amplifying our impact on projects and for our clients. We structured teams and internal processes, roles and career paths, our Playbook, and all our operations.

Above all, we allowed the values that inspired internal workshops and an initial manifesto to mature and gradually permeate every part of Tangible, to the point of changing our statute to a Benefit Corporation and obtaining B Corp certification.

Today we face very different challenges in terms of size and complexity, and not least for the speed with which the technological landscape evolves.

There is a theme of the scale of the impact of what we do, with design working at all levels, digital products, services, and processes, often for digital ecosystems and not just for individual touchpoints.

There is a theme of industrialization, which involves building Design Systems and assisting companies in internalizing mindsets, skills, and teams.

There is, of course, a theme of AI, which today is already a co-pilot to make some design processes more efficient and faster, but which tomorrow will have much more significant implications and uses.

There is an inevitable theme of ethics, which spans everything, care for the human and environmental dimensions of everything we help design and launch on the market, which can only become increasingly key as technology becomes faster and more pervasive.

“The more advanced technologies are, the more decisive design is”, stated a slide a few months ago in a talk by the always clear and precise Leandro Agrò: we couldn’t agree more, and the aforementioned fronts are functional to be able to play that role.

Finally, this post can only conclude with a heartfelt and profound Thank You.

This 20-year journey is a path to which extraordinary people have joined, from Luca and Ilaria to all the people who are today at Tangible and those who have passed through over time. You are the heart of this company, and every contribution you have made has shaped our team culture as it is today. Now you know why all names are listed on our team page on our website: it is intentional and a way to honour those who have run a part of this long relay with us.

A huge thanks also go to the many clients over these years, especially those who believed in us and entrusted us with projects when it might have been imprudent to do so because we were very young, small, and not well-structured. That trust allowed us to learn, challenge ourselves, and grow, and the gratitude for those opportunities underlies the care with which we treat every project.

And then the partners, coaches, consultants, trainers, and people we have had the fortune to cross paths with and from whom we have received skills, inspiration, advice, and teachings, enriching our baggage and especially broadening our perspective.

And finally, thanks to those companies and people who have helped shape this discipline over the past 20 years, foreign or Italian: a necessary comparison, a mirror, and a constant stimulus to improve ourselves and play our game, with the desire also to create events and tools for the benefit of the entire practice community.

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* just a few months ago in Pesaro, Ilaria and I had the opportunity to meet Don Norman in person, closing the circle after 20 years. I find it significant that he himself now talks about impact and sustainability, highlighting how a solely user-centered approach is no longer sufficient for today’s problems.