Visionary Days 2018

• 4 December 2018

After the positively surprising success of the opening year, Visionary Days returned to the stage, affirming itself as one of the most amusing and groundbreaking national events. 800 young men and women, brought together in the evocative context of the OGR (a former train factory converted to an event venue, in Turin), to write their visions of the future, in response to the “sparks” of various top-notch guest speakers on different topics related to innovation. Indeed, the stage featured a succession of figures boasting proven competence and charisma, such as Simone Ungaro (Movendo), Anna Cesereto (University of Trento), Stefano Galli (Sprint Reply), and the former MTV vee-jay Andrea Pezzi (Gagoo). In practical terms, the common thread at Visionary Days was a projection of the role we will have in a scenario growingly involving robots and artificial intelligence. A series of walls laid out in the great central aisle of the Sala Fucine allowed anyone to read – in real time – the visions written at the other tables, edited by a good example of cooperative artificial intelligence: Lee. Thanks to its computational speed, Visionary was able to edit a Livebook summarizing the day in real time, and distribute it to the participants at the end of the workshop.

Visionary Days proposed a collective, unfiltered vision experiment, designed for all those wishing to express their thoughts, without any fear of a greater authority. After all, those present were simply asked to do the most normal thing to do, often forgotten in favor of social networks and the nauseating cacophony of digital distractions that distinguish our age: to rediscover the pleasure of sitting together at a table, look at each other in the eyes in a friendly and stimulating context, and reflect on the matters that inevitably distinguish our own future and that of the generations after ours. The even format, to paraphrase the explicit suggestion made by the organizers, is a spot-on mix between a TED conference and a hackathon, able to involve and stimulate an extremely heterogeneous crowd in terms of academic background and experience. It comes as no surprise that Visionary Days has in plan to expand to other Italian stages, with the promise to organize new “days” in 2019 already. The network of visionaries is thus bound to grow, towards a future still in the writing, in which we shall be once again called upon to choose our own destiny.

Protocube Reply has confirmed its commitment to innovation-related events, by contributing to animate the Reply stand with certain examples of 3D printing and computer graphics. We hereby thank Triplesense Reply, Target Reply, and Concept Reply to have shared this beautiful experience with us.

Reply was the main sponsor of Visionary Days 2018, an event officially supported by the Turin Polytechnic, the Compagnia di San Paolo foundation, and the Fondazione CRT banking foundation, and with the patronage of the European Parliament, the regional government of Piedmont, the Turin Metropolitan Area, the City of Turin, the University of Turin, and AGID (agency for the digitalization of Italy).