If we all see the same things, how can we invent and create new things?
What will become of the world when everybody ends up making thumbtacks? This warning came from the great Italian conceptual artist Emilio Isgrò when talking about design. Technology or digital culture are not what is new. Neither are devices, startups or applications. Or, at least, they are not all that is new. The new is a far-reaching, widespread, popular way of being and thinking. When truly authentic, the new encompasses a vision that is open and projected into the future. It requires the ability to see reality with untainted eyes or di erent lenses.
The colored lenses of the imagination, as Munari described it. And these visions, which are just thoughts that might become something, seem a far cry from the pragmatism of reality, but if they are powerful enough, they have the extraordinary capacity to a ect reality itself.
We still live in the midst of certain new things that we “invented” and have been around for many centuries.
Take the Renaissance for instance and how much we still rely on it in times of change or when we need a new concept of the world and ourselves. The new must contain endless interruption and questioning. The new never tires of calling into question prejudices and moving beyond them. This means the new requires freedom. Freedom to think, plan, construct and create. Far too often we constrain this kind of newness with conventional time constructs and settle for operating in an established framework, just a newer version of the same old thing. Even today the challenges are the same, only on a greater scale and over a wider geographical area. Startups, which are the new knights of change, are the latest agents of social and cultural growth, with a fabulous and exhilarating task: to focus all their e orts on a unique vision of what is new. Because it really is possible to change reality and make it better, di erent, more open. And that notion of “changing the world”, which seems to be coated with a sheen of unrealistic rhetoric, really can come true. This is an extraordinary opportunity involving millions of people like never before. And so, recently, several countries have declared themselves to be “startup nations”. Places that reason and think like startups, in the broadest and most powerful sense of the word. Not just to create a new economy with all its limited companies and businesses, but to envisage a kind of society that embraces the realities of today.
Nowadays, we do not need any more decorative gadgets, we need to use technology, digital culture and scienti c research to meet the great challenges mankind currently faces. Right now. Right at this very moment. Rhetorical challenges maybe, but no less real or genuine for being so. Challenges a ecting millions of people. We need to examine such matters as social justice, quality of life, the environment, poverty, disease, and even education within a realm of action that is not con ned to and cannot be con ned to players in Italy, USA, Korea or Silicon Valley. The stage has no single language, dialect or boundary. It is the world itself. The startup movement is shaking up concepts like borders, governments and citizenship. Denmark has appointed its rst digital ambassador and in the near future we will be transforming new concepts, which, if carefully led and managed, will bring about powerful and bene cial changes. A new Re-naisance with man at its center. Steering clear of “isms” or ideologies and even startups themselves, people are the real reason for driving change.
Cristiano Seganfreddo, 2017
