overview
Mosaico started as a festival I was helping bring to life. The app became a way to extend that experience beyond the stage.
Mosaico is an independent music and culture festival in Sicily that I co-organise, built around live performances, unexpected spaces and a strong sense of community.
Because I was working on the festival from the inside, I kept thinking about everything that happens around the performances: the thoughts people leave with, the strangers sharing the same moment, the places they discover, and the small interactions that usually disappear once the night is over.
I wanted to explore whether a digital product could capture some of that energy without becoming another functional festival app.
So I used Mosaico as a personal product experiment, combining my role as an organiser with my curiosity around vibe coding, AI-assisted development and creative technology to build something specifically for the festival.
the problem
Festivals create intense moments. Then most of them disappear.
Thousands of people can stand under the same lights, hear the same song and experience something deeply personal at exactly the same time. But once the moment passes, very little remains beyond photos, stories and conventional social posts.
I wanted to explore a different digital layer: one that didn't pull people away from the festival, but made them more aware of the people, places and emotions already around them.
The concept became a shared, ephemeral archive where attendees could leave anonymous fragments, discover nearby stages and unlock more intimate interactions with artists.
product opportunity
I wanted to understand how far I could take an idea without waiting for a traditional product team.
AI coding tools were making it increasingly easy to move from interface concepts to working software. I was curious about what that could mean for a designer. Not: Can AI generate a UI? But: Can I use AI to explore a product idea deeply enough that people can actually experience it?
Mosaico became my playground for answering that question.
product idea
Leave a fragment, Not everything worth sharing needs a profile attached to it.
Attendees can leave anonymous fragments of their experience as:
Words
a thought, sentence or feeling.
Images
a visual memory from somewhere inside the festival.
Voices
a short piece of sound, spoken thought or moment.
Those fragments accumulate into a collective stream rather than a conventional social feed. The interface supports separate Words, Images and Voices views alongside the combined archive.
Anonymous by design.
Removing identity changed the behaviour I wanted the product to encourage. there are no personal brands to optimise.
No follower counts.
No pressure to perform for an audience.
A fragment matters because someone felt it here, not because of who posted it.
The source concept explicitly frames these community fragments as a way for strangers to realise they were experiencing similar loneliness, excitement, nostalgia or connection in the same physical space.
Artists became part of the experience too.
The stage shows the performer. The room could reveal the person.
Artist Rooms explored a more intimate relationship between performer and audience. Artists could leave hidden thoughts, dedications, audio messages and other fragments for people attending the festival.
Instead of another biography page, the artist space became something attendees could unlock and discover.
The physical space became part of the interface. Digital discovery should make you look up from the screen.
A Near Me experience surfaces stages and locations around the attendee, connecting the product directly to the geography of the festival. The concept also includes the programme alongside distance-aware stage discovery. Instead of optimising for screen time, the product could encourage movement:
What's happening around me?
What's 200 metres away?
What haven't I discovered yet?
That was an important principle: The app should send you back into the festival.
a new process
Vibe coding changed how I designed it.
This project wasn't designed entirely in Figma and then handed over. Using Claude, Cursor and Vercel alongside Figma, I could move repeatedly between product thinking, interface design and implementation.
The loop became much shorter:
idea
↓
prompt / code
↓
working interaction
↓
look at it
↓
change the product
↓
build again
That changed my role from designing representations of a product to directly manipulating the product itself.
What I learned
Vibe coding changes what is worth prototyping.
Ideas that previously felt too expensive or technically ambitious for an early experiment can now become tangible much sooner.
Designers can explore behaviour, not just screens.
Being able to manipulate a functioning product exposed questions that static mockups would have hidden.
Speed makes taste more important, not less.
When almost anyone can generate a competent interface quickly, deciding what shouldn't look conventional becomes increasingly valuable.
AI is most interesting to me as creative leverage.
The value wasn't that AI designed Mosaico for me. It was that I could follow an idea further than I could have alone — without reducing that idea to the visual conventions of the tools used to build it.
