Attoma: draw me a design agency
A subjective chronicle of a practice in transformation This is a risky move: to tell the story of twenty-five years of a design agency,…
TakingTiger Mountain[by Strategy].
Giuseppe Attoma Pepe
Senior Design Strategist
In 1974, Brian Eno titled his second solo album Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), loosely inspired by a Chinese revolutionary opera. He described it as a deliberate tension between two forces: “Half Taking Tiger Mountain – that medieval, physical sense of storming a military position; half By Strategy – that very 20th-century, intellectual idea of tactical systems interaction.”
That tension – between the archaic and the modern, between embodied action and abstract reasoning – has always resonated with me. It may well capture the essence of my approach to design.
Throughout my career, I’ve often chosen the side path – because lateral moves often reveal what the straight line can’t. I’ve played with paradoxes, borrowed disguises, and navigated complexity with a taste for both intuition and structure, and a touch of humour.
This site is dedicated to that posture. It’s a space for critical reflection, storytelling, and a design practice that doesn’t just deliver, but questions the very terms of delivery.
You’ll find traces of projects, essays-in-progress, a few past experiments, and ideas for the road ahead. Above all: it’s an invitation to conversation.
Stay tuned!
That tension – between the archaic and the modern, between embodied action and abstract reasoning – has always resonated with me. It may well capture the essence of my approach to design.
Throughout my career, I’ve often chosen the side path – because lateral moves often reveal what the straight line can’t. I’ve played with paradoxes, borrowed disguises, and navigated complexity with a taste for both intuition and structure, and a touch of humour.
This site is dedicated to that posture. It’s a space for critical reflection, storytelling, and a design practice that doesn’t just deliver, but questions the very terms of delivery.
You’ll find traces of projects, essays-in-progress, a few past experiments, and ideas for the road ahead. Above all: it’s an invitation to conversation.
Stay tuned!
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