By definition, innovation is about creating something new. But it is common sense that not always what is new is better.
People seem to be obsessed about a new gadget, app, material or even a car. Huge lines grow in front of stores to buy the new – anything. Is the latest collection of products launched during the Milan Design Week necessarily the best one? You do not need to be a design expert to see the point here.
The new is not necessarily good, in fact, it is much easier to “innovate” creating things that will not truly make our world a better place to live in. A simple exercise can illustrate this idea: take a paper and sketch as many chairs with something new as you can in ten minutes, how many did you design? Five? Ten? Fifteen or more? How many of them could be considered not only new, but actually better? Take another paper and start sketching again, but this time having these two attributes in mind. If you did more than ten alternatives, please send us your portfolio.
Some people believe it has only to do with mind-blowing novelty or something that came straight from a sci-fi movie, but sometimes a simple change of colors can transform something that has been the same for ages into a life-changing symbol of progress, like the special (RED) edition of Alessandro Mendini’s Anna G., an Italian best-selling masterpiece designed more than twenty years ago, is now helping to save lives with it’s sales.
After all, innovation is progressive and it does not happen all of a sudden. It is not about playing God and creating something absolutely new from scratch, but rather acknowledging the old and existent, using it to make something better. Maybe the real innovation does not come from a new products, but from a new way of seeing.
As days go by, each of them is a new one.
Maybe the goal is to make it better than the day before.
