‘Ideactionaries’: Those Who Imagine Anything and Create the Impossible

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to make the reader reflect on the transition from working to ideating. Working leads people to forget themselves and bury their heads in the sand, wrote the humanist Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) in 1928. In 1936, the writer and poet Cesare Pavese (1908-1950) advised in his collection of poems Lavorare stanca (Hard Labor) to take a closer look at the representations of men at work. Huxley and Pavese have led us forward to when ideactionaries will succeed workers. These translate ideas into action, devising revolutionary ways of designing and operating to deliver products and services and seeing the world. Theirs is meant to be a liveable, collective, co-creative (they transfer thoughts from one mind to another), constructive, transdisciplinary human experience. It must enrich the culture of intuition and imagination, of empathy towards society and the planet. It must educate young people to be guided by the good and to incorporate communication into action through vision, design of lived experience, mental models and meaningful metaphors.
It is up to scholars to take charge of this vision, even critically, so that the new generations can attend classrooms and research workshops modelled as a Renaissance Bottega (workshop). There, pupils were co-creators rather than mere executors of tasks assigned from above and generators of cognitive conflicts that do much to abrogate entrenched rules.