Design is a thought activity: we should not replace it with a mere “optimizing” approach, because it’s from imperfections that talent emerges.

In our digital era, design has become a wider concept, able to overcome the limits of the physical creation activity. We can design our thinking and ideas, before designing material manufactures, and that “immaterial” design is the basis of innovation.

Rather than just optimizing what already exists, creativity aims at “breaking” current limits: it’s committed in overcoming that boundaries, that imperfections. The sublime is never perfect, but it's full of different vanishing points, disequilibrium, openings. That’s true for the art: let’s consider the imperfect perspectives of Salone dei Cinquecento in Palazzo Pitti in Florence, where the first G7 of Culture took place in Italy. 

That is true also for diverse fields as sports, which is – in a way – an extraordinary “art of doing”. As Kareem Abdul Jabbar told during the last Oscar Pomilio Blumm Forum, his sky-hook is born from a limit, a boundary, that he overcame designing a new gesture in basketball, creating an innovation.  

We should regain that creativity, in order to get our future back: not just geniuses, but the whole community lives with ideas. And through ides, community grows, taking advantage of its limits and converting them into news possibilities, all to be designed.