IULM Flow Talk 28: Power & Purpose: Leadership of New Paradigms

Talk 28
May 5th 3.30 p.m.
Guest: Meg Pagani - founder of Impacton.org and (R)evolutionary
Moderator: Francesco Galli - IULM University
Title: Power & Purpose: Leadership of New Paradigms

This new special IULM FLOW Talk aims to understand, reflect and approach with critical thinking how the "Creativity and Design" discipline is dealing with the global challenge by exploring all innovative, unusual, and disruptive approaches, methods, visions, experiments, and ideas generated in these times of uncertainty and opportunity

Leadership is a concept that has a positive value in itself linked to its etymology, the concept of activate and motivate but also carries with it negative values typical of the political-cultural stratification that over the centuries has been associated with the etymology of the word itself.
Without wandering about speculations relating to the nature of the "anomaly", which has a worrying drifts, each different expression of the conflicts that humanity itself, nations, society, businesses and organizations, families, individuals had tried to hide or camouflage with often more communicative tricks and reputations, without ever dwelling on the very nature of the problems, every anomaly, following the suggestion of Thomas Samuel Kuhn in the book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" (1962), always generates one or more conflicts that change into a state of war which is the primary step to the change of paradigm, to the constitution of a potential new normal or new paradigm.

Rather then stressing the understanding of the " Creative design revolution" in terms of a breakthrough, we suggested in this conversation that the Creativity and design education can benefit from shifting the focus on expressing creativity through efficient artifacts to teaching the young generation how to preserve resources and adopt a leadership attitude.

We argued that this type of "Power and Purpose" can have a deeper and longer term impact on the creative education helping to adjust the expectations of the students to the reality of the continuously changing work environment.

The question remains if the new generation of Creative designers will be able to challenge the efficiency and maintain the energy of the possible change?