What Design Thinking Owes to Leonardo Da Vinci

In How Blockchain Binds Broad Visions To Reality and How Blockchain Is Impacted By The Medici Effect, we gave clues to the lessons that can be drawn from the Renaissance masters like Fioravante, Brunelleschi and their patrons like Cosimo de’ Medici.

But, what about Leonardo da Vinci? Leonardo is the Renaissance man par excellence. Still today, many of his drawings are used to symbolize humanistic values, creativity, innovation, and thought leadership. What place should Leonardo take in a pantheon of innovation teachers?

“Le proporzioni del corpo umano secondo Vitruvio” as represented on a German health insurance card in 2020.

Facts on Leonardo are scarce. He did leave his notebooks behind but concealed numerous personal and project details on purpose: either to protect his life from the Holy Inquisition or to protect his inventions from being copied.

In 1466 at 14, Leonardo moved to Florence. The Tuscan city was at the apogee of its power. The dome of Santa Maria del Fiore by Brunelleschi had been standing for 20 years, a third generation Medici was about to start ruling [1]. Thanks to them, Florence already had a public library for two decades. 10 years ago, in the Rhine valley, Gutenberg had fine-tuned his printing technique based on movable metal letters. This new process was starting to show comparable effects to the diffusion of knowledge that phonetic alphabets had had over the last two millennia. Printing was the information technology of Leonardo’s lifetime.

Number of books created per century in Europe [2] (in 1000, manuscripts and printed books) — an exponential curve as we know them from Moore’s law.

The extent of knowledge available to Leonardo can hardly be compared to the one available to us today. A single volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica contains more information than all of Leonardo’s notebooks put together. As of April 2020, Wikipedia holds 80 times more content than the complete edition of Encyclopædia Britannica. With Wikipedia alone, we have 2500 times more information at our fingertips than Leonardo ever had.

Depiction of the size of a hypothetical printed Wikipedia printed in the same physical format as the Encyclopedia Britannica, as of March 2020. Source: Size of printed Wikipedia March 2020.

And the curve is just taking off. We are only 50 years into the creation of personal computers, 30 years since the creation of the Internet. IDC predicts that the datasphere — which they define as the cumulated data in data centers, individual servers and devices — will grow from an estimated 50 Zettabytes (ZB) in 2019 to 175 ZB by 2025 [3]. This represents one billion times the size of Wikipedia and 200 trillion times the content that Leonardo had compiled in his lifetime [4].

The size of data is just a proxy for how transformative the digitalization of everything is, it helps us grasp the growth in information that Leonardo witnessed and enjoyed over his lifetime. Like us, he had no map of the upcoming transformations, but he did conjecture and play a significant role in the direction that technology would take. How did he do that?

In 1466, Leonardo’s father presented him to Andrea del Verrocchio. Verrocchio’s workshop was at the forefront of Renaissance techniques in drawing, painting, sculpting, leather, and metalwork. For Leonardo, this was a perfect learning environment. He was there as Verrocchio executed the finest bronze and marble works of their time[5]. As Leonardo turned 16, Verrocchio won the contract for the golden ball to be placed on top of the Brunelleschi’s dome. Leonardo witnessed and probably contributed to the layered copper work, again a never-before-seen technique was employed, and he saw Brunelleschi’s machines in use for the last time. In 1472, as the ball was placed on the dome, Leonardo, now 20, registered as a master in Florence.

What would truly set Leonardo apart was about to unfold. Work after work, he displayed incomparable observation and drawing skills which led to new techniques, mind-blowing pieces of art, incredible machines and prototypes.

• In anatomy, Leonardo’s drawings of the heart are astonishing cardiologists to this day [6].
• In painting, Leonardo observed that drawing lines are an approximation of how light propagates. He developed the technique of the Sfumato (fog) that gave Mona Lisa her mysterious smile and blurry landscape.
• In his second most famous painting, The Last Supper, he experimented with oil paints on dry plaster. This brought out colors that were more brilliant than the ones obtained from water-soluble paints.
• Many of his sketches were also tested later to be working or working with slight modifications. This includes parachutes, diving suits, musical instruments and more [7].

When it comes to deciding where and how to use different technologies such as blockchain, artificial intelligence, the internet of things, or quantum computing in our industries, communities, and societies, we are often as clueless as the Renaissance masters. To progress, we can follow the path etched by Leonardo. Where Leonardo was observing, we empathize, where he was wondering, we define, where he was asking, we ideate, where he sketched again and again, we prototype and iterate as fast as possible. This is very much a workable definition of design thinking. The only difference is that, due to the amount of data and specialization required to cope with most topics of our time, we must work in teams, building on each other’s expertise more than ever before.

Stanford’s d. School design thinking model overlapped with Leonardo’s practices.

In the pantheon of innovation teachers, Leonardo is the one who gives the first recipe for being systematic about creativity.

Such is the path ahead for us. Chinese, Muslim, Florentine and other experts were standing in sequence on the shoulders of their predecessors. So are we on theirs: They teach us to observe, be open and practice our art. Let’s do that. Like for them, the path will reveal itself as we go, and the landscape will be beautiful as we are transforming it and ourselves for the better.

Notes and sources

1. Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449–1492) comes to power in 1469 upon the death of his father Piero (1416–1469). Lorenzo’s grandfather, Cosimo (1389–1464), had sponsored Brunelleschi (1377–1446). Lorenzo’s grand-grand-father Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici (1360–1429) was contemporary to Neri di Fioravante (…-1374).
2. Source: Eltjo Buringh, Jan Luiten van Zanden, 2009, Charting the “Rise of the West”: Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, A Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through Eighteenth Centuries.
3. The Digitization of the World From Edge to Core, David Reinsel, John Gantz, John Rydning, IDC White Paper #US44413318, Sponsored by Seagate, November 2018. The estimated size of the datasphere in 2020 is displayed on page 6 with 50 ZT.
4. The size of Wikipedia is not directly available from the corresponding Wikipedia page, but can be derived. As of June 2015, the dump of all pages with complete edit history in XML format is about 100 GB compressed and 10 TB uncompressed. The size of the media files in Wikimedia Commons, which includes the images, videos and other media used across all the language-specific Wikipedias was described as “well over 23 TB near the end of 2014”. This make a total of around 35 TB in 2015. Extrapolating from the word count growth over the same period (+45%), the total size of Wikipedia in all languages including media should be around 50 TB uncompressed. One zettabyte is equivalent to one billion terabyte. With 50 ZB, the datasphere as defined and estimated by IDC is around one billion (1,000,000,000) times the size of Wikipedia.
5. Such as the bronze statue of David for Piero de’ Medici and the marble funerary monument of Cosimo de’ Medici.
6. See What Leonardo taught us about the heart, By Philippa Roxby, Health reporter, BBC News, June 2014.
7. See e.g. the dedicated Wikipedia article, Science and inventions of Leonardo da Vinci.