Why Courage Matters

Daniel Tammet is a high functioning autistic. That means he has a form of Asperger syndrome that allows him to describe how he does what he does. And what he does is amazing. In fact, he is one of fewer than 100 people in the world described as a ‘prodigious savant’.

One fascinating dimension of his reality is how he understands the number ‘pi’. He sees it as a shape. He holds the European record for reciting ‘pi’ from memory with 22,514 digits in just over 5 hours. For Tammet, “each positive integer up to 10,000 has its own unique shape, colour, texture and feel. He has described his visual image of 289 as particularly ugly, 333 as particularly attractive, and pi, though not an integer, as beautiful.”1

All this makes Tammet’s condition unusually interesting. For understanding Savantism, “He could be the ‘Rosetta Stone’.”2

For all the achievements of human kind, the vast majority of human beings are the same. Our minds work in more or less the same way: We interact with one another according to a set of tacitly agreed upon standards and rules.

So how is it that we are capable of such powerful discoveries? How is it that in a universe that is 13.8 billion years old we can go from singing to the moon to walking on it over the course of only a few hundred years?

We are a species that wonders and explores and discovers. That means we are constantly working at the frontier. Whether physical or intellectual, we are always struggling forward in darkness, reaching. Physical frontiers all start with frontiers of the mind. We are confronted with a question and we somehow find an answer. It is a creative act. If the definition of design is ‘to mark out,’ then it is an act of design.

So how do we do it?

Frontier is a design company that sheds the traditional idea of a design company. We do not see design as a service, but as a catalyst. Everything we do supports a philosophy of design as a force for creative problem solving. Everything we do supports a life of inquisitive exploration.

That means that we are a magazine, ventures group and design studio. We believe in design driven ideas and idea driven design at the frontiers of creativity and invention. We believe that exploration and discovery are not only important for a full life. They are crucial.

Our first issue of Frontier Magazine, launching in a few weeks, is devoted to that question. What is the nature of discovery? How do we escape from the fundamental power of normalcy and extend our thinking past deep rooted conventions and ways of thinking?

The answers are all around us in every human pursuit that necessitates innovation. Frontier is devoted to the courage of those exploring that infinite frontier: the undiscovered.