Youthful Creativity

It’s too easy to dismiss the ideas and ambitions of youth as flights of fancy. Business needs experience to function. It needs an understanding of the way things work to keep the wheels turning.

But wander through this year’s graduate degree show at the University of Arts, Central Saint Martins, as I did last week, and all notions of experience being the driving force of wisdom will soon evaporate from your mind.

Exhibits in Communication Design, Industrial Design, Innovation Management, Narrative Environments and Textile Futures reveal the emergence of a new generation of highly ambitious, curious, and creative talent looking to disrupt all manner of business through radical creativity.

One student talked to me about her desire to make shopping more “human and social” rather than an exercise in the sharing of purchases through social media.

Another pulled me to one side to discuss her thoughts on the power of nostalgic memories in communication design and the methodologies that could be used to discover these.

And perhaps the most absorbing conversation I had that night centered on alternative ways of dealing with data and privacy through hardware and software design.

Each of these students had worked through their provocations, sought out the input of collaborators, and gotten down to the hard work of turning their line of thinking into tangible and commercial things.

Within hours of returning home, I’d received several emails and tweets requesting further discussion and collaboration around a host of propositions.

Our industry, like every industry, is undergoing fundamental reformation with respect to the far-reaching impacts of new digital technologies. Yet we struggle to explain the changes we’re witnessing. And we struggle even harder to spur new thinking and new behaviors.

All the while there are these young minds just getting on with the business of imagining and creating better.

I think it’s time we embraced the ambitions and creativity of youth.

Wayne Fletcher
Group Chief Strategy Officer
@drwayne