Imagination - “a discovery of boundless possibilities"

by Nairat Ali

Imagination - “a discovery of boundless possibilities”.  However, for whom and is this for everyone?

In a recent away day, The TSIP team took some time to deepen our collective understanding on the varied approaches to enabling imagination. This has always been such a fundamental part of our service offering, especially during strategy and co-design, and the strong imperative to ‘reimagine’ has been brought to the fore again due to the vast inequalities and protracted socio-economic and political crises we have faced over the past decade. 

The team was asked to describe what ‘imagination’ meant to them. You can see various responses in the Jamboard picture below:

Through our learning session, we began to contextualise the extent to which privilege impacts on imagination, which is especially important to our work with under-served communities. In our attempt to unpack this, we set the foundations of imagination as a tool used to create the systems and structures of society both past and present, and those yet to be imagined. Imagination is a transformative mechanism that enables us to innovate and shift those structures that we live by today. Whether those systems and structures are fit for purpose opens the door to understanding the varied approaches to imagination. 

We introduced imagination infrastructuring; viewing a fantastic video shared by the National Lottery Community Fund that provided context and a key insight into using the structures we have today for the imagination of tomorrow. A link to that video here.

Our partnerships with clients, funders and communities all require space for imagination. Therefore, acknowledging how imagination can be perceived to be a privilege is critical when working with people from such a huge divergence of backgrounds. We frequently look to communities with lived experience to reimagine a new way of working. When the possibility of disenfranchisement comes into play for this group too, it’s essential that we hold back from offering critiques of whether imagination is a privilege or not, but rather harness these sentiments into positive actions. Imagination may indeed be a privilege for some, and the recognition of this is important as we continue to channel our resources into creating infrastructure, within which others feel safe to share their imaginations. 

Ultimately, imagination is the first step to making better realities possible.