Talking about future, Albert Einstein once said: logic will get you from A to B, imagination will take you everywhere. Only imagination has the power to make that paradigm “leap” necessary to design the future.

If the future represents the ability to have a perspective, almost in the literal sense, then imagination and creativity are fully-fledged conditions for individual and collective happiness. This was the main theme of the latest Oscar Pomilio Blumm Forum, which brought to the attention the multiple senses of this often abused word, in order to return its revolutionary potential, starting from the completely new experience of having among the main speakers a minister “from the North”, whose work is totally dedicated to the future.

Happiness is reception, encounter between those who run away from pain and those who are willing to relieve it, exactly what’s been happening for months on Lesvos coasts and other Mediterranean islands. But happiness is also beauty and “social” art, such as the street lamp that lights up at each new life, or the relief in healing and help healing, what has been done for years in brave communities like San Patrignano.

Finally, there’s a kind of happiness in the mere act of designing, producing objects which remain beyond themselves: an object can disappear, but the idea of future from which it was born, remains and leaves a trace. It’s up to us to remember how to interpret this trace and follow the path.