Imagination Infrastructuring 01
Recordings + Resources
On the 10th of June we hosted an afternoon of talks & conversations on imagination infrastructuring and collective imagination - how it’s defined, how it can be resourced and grown, and why it’s so important.
We heard from infrastructure experts, people building methodologies and practices for collective imagining, and some of the organisations supporting this work, as well as a showcase of some emerging work (some funded through the Emerging Futures Fund), including Farzana Khan (Healing Justice London), Anab Jain (Superflux), Indy Johar (Dark Matter Labs), Eshanthi Ranasinghe (Omidyar), Kat Cizek (MIT Collective Wisdom Lab), Amahra Spence (MAIA), Suriya Aisha, Ari Melenciano, Melissandre Varin, Rohan Gunatillake (NHS Scotland), Anna Abraham (University of Georgia), Cat Drew (Design Council), Alex Gillespie (LSE), Imandeep Kaur (Civic Square), Jayne Engle, Rob Hopkins (Transition Network), Michele D'Alena (Civic Imagination Office, Bologna), Andre Reid (Kiondo), Baljeet Sandhu (Centre for Knowledge Equity), Iris Andrews (New Constellations), James Goodman & Grace Bremner (Local Trust), Rachel Smith (The Barbican).
The rich resources generated during the event have been made available online. Videos of each session have been uploaded to YouTube and can be accessed here, and an archive of the thoughts, comments, ideas and visions of those who attended the event can be found here. We are also building up an Imagination Infrastructuring library on Notion - a list of resources and references useful for designing any work in this space.
The event itself was preceded by a blog digging deeper into what we actually mean by Imagination Infrastructuring:
“When combined, though, the amalgam 'imagination infrastructure' evokes more than the sum of its two parts. Three possible meanings arise when we bring together these two very different words. First, an infrastructure which supports the use and development of the skill and faculty of imagination; second, a process or methodology involving the use of imaginative faculties to design new infrastructure; and third, a description of the way certain forms of sociotechnical imaginaries are embodied in physical infrastructures.
These three meanings are entangled with each other—not mutually exclusive, but complementary, even co-constitutive. In The National Lottery Community Fund’s with our partners on this notion of imagination infrastructure, we try to hold onto all three of these meanings as we explore what its implications might be for our work and the work of the communities we fund. How can we build up an infrastructure, both physical and metaphysical, tangible and intangible, to enable the development, the practices and use of collective imagination? We’re particularly interested in how the collective works here - what it means for us to imagine together, how the grouping of intelligence progresses our ability to envisage and build different futures.
This infrastructure will be more than a set of foundations or a scaffold. It will look, in fact, more like a playground: which exists, not subordinate to or below some other, more important work, but as a structure in its own right, one which supports, co-creates, and constantly re-produces play, creativity, imagination. Not something which can be taken away once the work is done, but which is itself the work--continually revisited, made new, repurposed, infrastructured (more on this below), to be used by communities, leaders and networks to collectively imagine better futures.”
You can read the rest here.