On Imagination

Contemporary scholars such as Sohail Inayatullah, Roberto Poli and Riel Miller emphasize the importance of futures literacy, which is the capacity to imagine, critique and reframe multiple futures. Futures literacy expands our ability to navigate uncertainty and enables people to generate new meanings rather than simply extrapolate from current... See more

Creativity typically refers to applied problem-solving, often operationalized through practical techniques. It is possible to train creativity like a muscle—to generate novelty through recombination, transformation or adaptive iteration. Creativity thrives within constraint and is usually focused on producing outcomes. Imagination, however, is... See more

Imagination, in this light, becomes a foundational asset—not just for speculative design or cultural expression, but for shaping the next generation of institutions and business models. It enables a shift from reactive, short-term thinking to proactive, regenerative strategies that can thrive in complexity and uncertainty. For entrepreneurs... See more

Reclaiming imagination from this epistemic capture means recognizing that other ways of imagining have existed all along: relational, embodied, collective, often rooted in resistance. Indigenous cosmologies, Black speculative traditions, feminist temporalities and minoritarian storytelling all offer ways of imagining that do not reproduce hierarchy... See more

In futures studies, imagination is often described as the precondition for anticipation: we can only shape futures we are able to imagine. Without imagination, we remain trapped within the constraints of the present, repeating and refining what already exists.

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... See more

Unlike creativity, which can be treated as a technical skill, imagination operates at the intersection of perception, memory, cultural framing and ethical projection. In contexts of design and systems change, practical imagination is critical for challenging dominant imaginaries, surfacing suppressed alternatives and making non-linear futures... See more

imagination is a form of social practice, not an individual fantasy. It is embedded in everyday life and shaped by flows of media, migration and political economy. Similarly, Pierre Bourdieu showed how the habitus—our embodied disposition shaped by social class and history—influences what we perceive as possible or impossible. Imagination is not... See more

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