possibility studies

Curiosity and possibility are typically subject to a novelty bias. People commonly conceptualize possibility as a harbinger of the new. What is old is already actualized; what is new is merely possible. Similarly, curiosity is thought, among scholars and lay people alike, to be piqued by and to produce the new. Repeatedly, across multiple fields

Most germane for our purposes, knowledge, too, can be analyzed as a network. In this case, nodes can be pieces of information, or experiences, or words, or knowers themselves, while the edges can be the relationships between those pieces of information, those experiences, words, or knowers.

imagination is an extremely powerful force for change and humanity can build bridges and empower us to create worlds that are more in line with our values. Imagining allows us not just to see a different future but to explore the impacts of it happening

No matter whether we are talking about realistic or unrealistic possibilities, at the heart of this notion stands a commitment to the idea that the world is not yet finished, that it is in a continuous process of becoming, and that this becoming – for as much as we might anticipate it – is never entirely predictable. Beyond ‘what currently is’,

Without curiosity, the space of the adjacent possible would exist but remain unplumbed and inactive. Curiosity then opens up adjacent possibilities, whether that means new nodes and edges or the reformulation of existing nodes and edges (and ultimately of the network itself).

Although imagination is messy and fragmentary, I’ve found many patterns that we can make use of. I highlight that all novel inventions extend, invert or combine existing ideas; imagination is never a tabula rasa. Instead, our minds play with what’s around us, building on already familiar concepts, and we can choose to do this more systematically.

even in places where there’s more optimism, there are fewer signs of social imagination than in the past.

Potentialities for growth, then, are available in all directions—toward what has never been thought and back to what must be rethought.

Real possibility, however, is a potentiality that is live precisely because it is rooted in the material here and now (unlike either faux or formal possibilities). Importantly, real possibility can open onto the past just as much as onto the future. The present has the potential to be curiously disrupted along both its edges: the “forward-dawning”