imagine
"whose imagination do we live inside of right now and how can we grow capacity to move beyond that?"
Amahra Spence
There is a school of thought that says we are suffering from a
‘crisis of imagination’
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Geoff Mulgan describes this as the 'deficit of social imagination' and that many people find it hard to imagine a future a generation or two ahead.
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There are many reasons why this might be the case (and Mulgan describes several) - the complexity of the world removing our sense of agency or the idea drummed into us that the current state of affairs is the natural victor and the only option for the future.
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A very basic reason is just that people don't have the time or mental space to think about a future for themselves, let alone broader society.
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Green New Deal Devon wants to address this most fundamental element - give people the time, space and tools to think about their future and a future for society.
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There are lots of exciting ways to excite and expand imaginations - we will be using and testing many different methods and build our
imagination toolkit for others to use as well.
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For more information about imagining, check out Joseph Rowntree's Emerging Futures work.
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Donella Meadows, author of Limits to Growth and proponent of systems thinking, summarises in this speech how society expects us to imagine in the negative.
This is a 1 minute clip - it's worth listening to the whole thing if you have time
Imagination Toolkit
Scenario-based imagining
Participants are choose a particular scenario from everyday life. They work through what that scenario would ideally look like in 20/30/40 years’ time, stepping through each part of the journey. There are guiding questions on the back of the cards. Click on the image above to download a print-ready copy of the cards.
Draw like a child
This is a fun ice-breaker exercise to get people thinking differently, to introduce the idea that barriers to imagination can be thrown aside. When we were children, we drew without restrictions - people could have 4 heads or live in the sky! This can be an free-drawing exercise or you can use the scenario cards to guide the exercise.
Throw-away cards
These cards contain different barriers to imagining a better future. Participants physically case these aside to symbolise removing those barriers. You can download the above as print ready cards, but the phrases could also been used on physical objects, like a stone, to better symbolise casting it aside.
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Doughnut
This is a simplified version of Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics. It allows imaginers to put their ideas into the safe space where possible. Click the image to download a print-ready version.
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