What is the ability to innovate? Being able to innovate is a feature or quality or mindset that somebody has and someone else does not? 

“Altering the order of established ‘things’ to do new ‘things’.”

“Changing a state of things, introducing new rules, methods, systems.”

Altering the order means making a disorder and then recreating a new order. Innovation seems a revolutionary performance, subverts the ‘established order’ to change it and establish a new one. Think about Bauhaus in Germany during the 1920s. It is precisely this mechanism at work. Think about Italy during the 1970s. We see Memphis subverting the Bauhaus established order to attempt to make a new one.

But more interesting is that these innovations coexist and perhaps even influence each other, creating new ideas. I have never trusted those who claim to have a definitive solution. It is always an ongoing process. Bauhaus, for example, in the early years had emerged as an innovative force but then began to turn around on itself, believed to be the final and only solution to all problems. A bit too much. 

Innovation is like a wind. You can’t stop it with doctrines and faiths. It is a wind that constantly changes direction all the time. Whenever it has blown towards somewhere, it changes and wants to blow and push the designers’ ships somewhere else, new seas to explore. And that’s fine because nothing is static, everything is in motion, and we, our societies, and our cultures move from period to period. 

Where is this innovation? It is beyond… beyond the known ordinary world. 

If you read Joseph Campbell, ‘The hero of The Hero with a Thousand Faces’, you can see how “The hero’s adventure” begins in the ordinary world. He must depart from it and then cross a guarded threshold, leading him to a supernatural world, where familiar laws and order do not apply. Then the hero will come back with some novelty in his or her head and change what has become the old world. 

It seems every great story is simply talking about how to become innovative. Reading great literature is always good. 

Who knows why so many people spend time reading step-by-step books on being creative or innovative when innovation is beyond whatever step-by-step guideline. probably because very few want to be innovative. Many young designers wish to become ‘Famous Designer.’ That is an entirely different matter. A so call famous designer today is essentially a mannerist. 

Slight digression on mannerism. Mannerism is a historical period linked to the second generation of artists who came after Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and other great renaissance masters. These masters appear to everybody like the ultimate level in terms of art. They were huge, immense, larger than life. The only thing to do was to copy their ‘manner’ but, on the one hand, make it more complicated to show that they were excellent and outstanding and then, on the other hand, make everything more playful and surprising. 

Mannerists, To put it simply, sell more than innovators. 

Do you like Bauhaus, and do you want to be like them? Do you think that Sottsass is the peak of creativity, and do you want to follow in his footsteps? Have you seen William Morris at an exhibition, and now you think that craftsmanship is fantastic and deserve to be enhanced? Very well. Great artists and designers show us new ways of doing things and new reasons for designing things. 

But since they are also highly marketable, easy to sell (because they have already been seen and digested by most) so the risk of becoming a mannerist is very high.