"In a renaissance society driven by the need to forge connections, play is the ultimate system for social currency. It's a way to try on new roles without committing to them for life. It's a way to test strategies of engagement without being defined by them forever. It's a way to rise above the seemingly high stakes of almost any situation and see it as the game it probably is. It's a way to make one's enterprise a form of social currency from the beginning, and to guarantee a collaborative, playful, and altogether more productive path toward continual innovation." [Doug Rushkoff, Get Back in the Box]
As many of you know, Renaissance was a European cultural movement that took place between the Middle Ages and the Reformation. It came in all sorts of flavors for the many countries in which it blossomed. In Italy, il Rinascimento saw a beautiful fusion of art and science -- think of the works of Leonardo.
I have a Leonardo as a friend: Leonardo Previ that is, at Italian knowledge factory Trivioquadrivio. The company’s cultural mission, a weighty one, is to unify all knowledge. This mission is reflected in the company’s name: In the Dark Ages, knowledge was split in the arts of the trivium (dialectics, grammar, rhetoric) and the disciplines of the quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy).
Trivioquadrivio uses a methodology that unifies and cuts across disciplines and combines the knowledge and practices of art, philosophy, architecture, design, literature, video production, and web design to help companies generate, produce, and manage knowledge through high-level cultural experiences.
What if we all considered ourselves renaissance people? What would we do more of?
[illustration of Santa Maria del Fiore and Battistero in Florence]