Invention and innovation

“Whoever invented the wheel was an idiot, who invented the other three who was a genius”. (Isaac Sidney Caesar). This collection investigates the origin of everyday design, objects and products that today the market takes for granted and offers to us through thousands of facets and revisions. Studying and researching the origin of our daily life, it is possible to go back to those precursors that centuries before had the ardor of knowing how to imagine, to see beyond the context and to hypothesize worlds and people. Figures known as Leonardo Da Vinci, and illustrious strangers of whom we know and make use of inventions, but of which we ignore the origins. And this is precisely what makes these figures unique and now extinct, the inventors. In a time when the imagination was strong and knowledge was an elitist luxury, figures emerged that from a few instruments did not simply transform the real into potential, but created the real by inventing it. There was no designer, architect, engineer or artist, but a single figure that contained all of these figures and of each discipline was the greatest expert. A figure that today we would call hybrid, extremely qualified, and not truly specialized because of his extremely versatile nature. With the growth of knowledge, we see this figure as being split into many smaller, less qualified entities, but highly specialized in every disciplines where there is no longer talk of invention, but of innovation. Today the inventor is an extinct figure and the invention is a taboo that modernity cannot afford, perhaps precisely because the incomplete knowledge its designers. We are no longer able to create, but to develop instruments of thought and realization that we are able to resume the existing and to re-structure it, to reduce it to the needs. Looking at the evolution of this figure, it is possible to draw a curve in which, with the passing of the years, these macro-masters have become indented in many highly specialized micro-disciplines, so much so that they have to start cooperating in order to achieve concrete projects, creating synergies, converging again into increasingly productive interdisciplinary realities. This collection shows yesterday’s inventions and today’s innovations and focuses on authors. If once upon a time the Master existed and today the Team exists, is it possible to imagine that you are returning to that hybrid and, by now, mythical figure of the inventor?