Where the big thinkers are headed

“Our society will never be great until our cities are great. Today the frontier of imagination and innovation is inside those cities and not beyond their borders.”

When President Lyndon B. Johnson made his ‘Great Society’ speech almost sixty years ago, he recognised a basic truth about humankind, one that has persisted from ancient Alexandria, Varanasi and Beijing to the present day. “We come together in cities in order to live, but remain together in order to live the good life.”

This was Aristotle observing Athens in 4th century BCE. Today, it is what we call civilisation.

Today’s real creative challenge

Now with 68% of the world population projected to live in cities by 2050 – up from around half today – the question of how we live together becomes our paramount priority. Indeed, the next Expo in Osaka, Japan, in 2025 builds on the theme of ‘Designing Future Society for our Lives’ with specific focus on the UN strategic development goal of Sustainable Cities and Communities.

As if to prove President Johnson’s prescience, the world’s imagination has most recently been sparked by The LINE, Saudi Arabia’s revolutionary design for a cognitive city stretching across 170 kilometres of desert. A mirrored architectural marvel towering 500 metres above sea level, but a land-saving 200 metres wide, it redefines the concept of car-less, zero emission urban development.

A fresh approach to innovation

For true creative thinkers, this is the kind of challenge that is making a genuine difference to how we live together. Whether the brief is to design an adventure park for families, write a constitution to redefine the civic code for a city or imagine an exhibition space for cultural dialogue, tomorrow’s agenda demands diverse skills from across creative industries.

This is the practical human ingenuity that fills our days with beauty and wonder. To not only build cities, but to also shape nations. And this is where a company like Insignia starts, because human needs, desires, hopes and dreams are the heartbeat of all we design – whether reimagining a national coastal highway into a journey through time or transforming an island into a whole new season on the global yachting calendar.

Insignia mines deep insights into what matters to individuals, communities, corporations and even governments. We decode cultures, shape trends, and predict the headwinds of change. So that every place and experience we create serves to enlarge and enlighten the human spirit.

Our mission is to make new places familiar and familiar places new. To make the whole world worthy of travel. To write our signature on tomorrow. To achieve the impossibly human wherever we go.

A new kind of creative business

This is why every month we are joined by empathetic futurists from all kinds of disciplines. socio-anthropologists, urban designers, technologists, designers, architects, engineers, poets and philosophers, to strategists and project managers.

Together we are inventing a new kind of creative company. If you would like to know more, please take a look at our website, or get in touch and tell us what you can do to shape a better future.

Thinking the incredible starts with asking the impossible.