Crea©tivity WorkOut 2008

Today the ability to create innovation is one of the principal resources available to manufacturers to ensure that their products are competitive. This is an important aspect that contributes towards their success on the market. Manufacturers need innovation and an ability to be able to offer new proposals. This not only means carrying out good products, but also intervening in the connections and relations between the various participants. The productive situation of today needs new figures, not moulded to suit their image, but unlimited; schools and tuition cannot be and are no longer containers of knowledge, but places where new theories and quality can be developed, junctions to which the productive situation and society are linked; this is why the relationship between design and teaching should be seen as a decisive collaboration for experimentation and long term research. The instruments are not only material and physical, but also conceptual, with clear and declared positions on determined medium and long term problems and situations. The aim behind the Crea©tivity WorkOut is to create new relations within the developments of the project and trace areas where paths for the development of design projects can be grafted by providing participants with the knowledge, aptitudes and instruments that are indispensable for acquiring the design skills required for the construction of a shared product. Crea©tivity WorkOut is a fully packed experience, a “tumultuous collective brainstorming” that stimulates a spontaneous and knowledgeable design process, where project developments are accelerated and intertwined, leading the participants to explode the reference horizons in a continuous comparison. The result is not only a product design but also a vision where settings, trends, needs and solutions can be traced. The Crea©tivity WorkOut, which follows an “immersion” type formula, is spread over 2 days and its participants are offered a project framework which should give life to a collective brainstorming, when work on the project really begins. Stimulated by a constant flow of new materials and technological processes, mobility design is moving its centre of gravity further and further away from portable objects to garments that can undergo a formal, functional and ergonomic metamorphosis, mutations that are often inspired by the group behaviour of many forms in nature, when single elements unite to face up to situations on various levels. Inspired by stimulants like these, workshop participants have advanced many proposals for modular objects made up of parts with independent functions that add to its areas of use. This progress recalls the wake we leave behind us, impressions that testify to a background experience and the young workshop participants are invited to play down the icon of products to be preserved intact by creating objects to live with, where signs of a background experience become an added value and no longer a defect.

(Angelo Minisci, teacher at the Florence ISIA and co-ordinator of Crea©tivity WorkOut)