Imagination: A Manifesto (A Norton Short)

Designers and strategists working toward preferable futures must recognize that technical forecasting and trend analysis are not enough. Imagination is what allows alternatives to emerge—alternatives that are often suppressed by dominant narratives of innovation, growth and inevitability. When imagination is reclaimed as a civic and political capac... See more

Faced with climate change and other interconnected existential crises in the twenty-first century, it is quickly becoming a cliché to say that there is a strong need to “imagine better futures.” But such a statement hides many questions and challenges. Who gets to imagine these futures? Who feels safe and supported enough, economically, politically... See more

The problem is the gulf between this restless, fascinating technological imagination and the much more limited imagination that exists in relation to so much else. It’s not that alternative futures are absent.21 It’s just that the scientific side of imagination is far more prominent, far better funded and inevitably far less sensitive to the precar

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Imagination must be understood as a critical responsibility—not as a resource to extract, nor a differentiator in markets, but as a capacity that must be cultivated and protected. In a world increasingly driven by predictive models, short-term optimization and commodified creativity, the role of designers is not simply to generate novel ideas, but ... See more