Another World Is Possible

So, for ideas banks to be useful, they need labels and indexes, and to be categorised with more than keywords. There needs to be some ranking, whether by volunteers or by experts, and some interpretation alongside the ideas themselves. Ideally, there should be some reward or recognition if an idea is adopted, adapted or used. This is a technical

Of course, and again as in the arts, we need the pull of demand. As I showed in Chapters 7 and 8, ideas can take many paths to reality: top down through persuading a handful of leaders, bottom up pushed by social movements, or through the middle. The crucial point is that supply needs to be met by demand, and this is where engaging the potential us

Csikszentmihalyi and Hall showed that it’s not enough to have brilliant artists, academies and schools, or funders, or a critical mass of other creative types, or even enthusiastic audiences. Rather, it is when all of these factors coalesce that creative work becomes much more likely to be truly exceptional. It’s the combination of these elements t

As Ursula Le Guin described, two clock pendulums placed side by side on a wall will start to swing together. Any two objects that are close to each other and oscillate at around the same rate will move into a lockstep of this kind because it requires less energy. Le Guin wrote, ‘Things are lazy. It takes less energy to pulse cooperatively than to p

As the Chinese proverb goes, ‘When the wind of change blows, some build walls, while others build windmills.’

John Dewey argued that every political project needs to create the public that can be its author.8 In the same way, every utopia has to call into existence the public necessary for its creation, a public that can champion and own it.

Beyond committed individuals, there’s an important role for political parties that are willing to engage with imagination to set up commissions, deliberations and explorations of the landscape ahead of them. Since parties remain our only institutions designed to create synthetic programmes that can win majority support, it’s vital that they attend

based. I’ve long been convinced of the potential for more ‘challenge-based’ universities, which organise more of their output around unanswered questions rather than just bodies of knowledge, and which work with their home regions or cities on the cutting edge of science or social innovation. The spread of innovation labs, design teams and social s

Even better would be centres and teams that worked on fields such as health or cities and were flexible in their use of different disciplines to solve problems. We could imagine ‘Exploratory Social Science’ degrees that would require students to show a grasp of their subject and its theory as well as an ability to create. The test for them would be