Imagination is the Next Victim

Save It Before It’s Too Late

Many words have been overused, overanalysed, butchered, and made irrelevant. Sustainability, resilience, games, creativity and design are the most recent known victims. In semiotics, they call them empty signifiers, words that initially mean something but the more they are used, their reference to what they signified becomes vague. They become demands ‘emptied’ of meaning to symbolise a multiplicity of contradictory demands.

Some believe empty signifiers should be seen as an opportunity. They argue that the vagueness would bring a wide range of people together who are in one way or another interested in that concept, encouraging critical discussions and reflection on the concept. Others argue that by becoming empty signifiers these concepts lose their credibility, discouraging everyone from using and reflecting on the concept all in all. I am with the second group.

Take creativity for example. I have heard the word in its various forms a million times over the past decade. It appeared in every advert, on every report front, and project title. Today, we publish books openly denying the value of creativity all in all. In academia, some scholars even intentionally avoid the term so that they won't be associated with certain trends or ideas. We talk about creativity but we replace it with other concepts, and in doing so butcher the new concept as well.

The most recent word falling into this trap is imagination. I have attended four events in the past few months where imagination was the key term. All four had imagination in their title and all four were about how we can come up with new ideas for managing our cities. Here are some of the most alarming combinations I came across: moral imagination, collective imagination, and imagination-led design. These phrases if not wrong, do not mean anything. The adjectives used for imagination in these phrases show how the concept is starting to mean something completely different than what was once popular.

In the Standford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy imagination is defined as:

To imagine is to represent without aiming at things as they actually, presently, and subjectively are. One can use imagination to represent possibilities other than the actual, to represent times other than the present, and to represent perspectives other than one’s own. Unlike perceiving and believing, imagining something does not require one to consider that something to be the case. Unlike desiring or anticipating, imagining something does not require one to wish or expect that something to be the case.

It’s also important to highlight how it differs from concepts of creativity and innovation. The general idea is that creativity is using the imagination to produce a creative work that is novel and useful. While imagining is an individual act, happening in one's mind, creativity necessarily requires others to evaluate your idea for its novelty and usefulness. Imagination is a key ingredient of creativity but the terms are not equal. Innovation then is about operationalizing and implementing new ideas. So why those combinations of terms are problematic?

Collective Imagination

The phrase is used recently very often in referring to practices that were referred to as participatory and collaborative. The idea is that a group of people would get together and come up with scenarios and ideas about the future.

If as defined, imagination happens in one’s mind, can it ever be collective? Well, the answer is yes. Humans are social in nature. so our imagination, whatever it is and however it occurs, in one way or another is inspired by our environment, the people around us and everyday events. So there is always a level of collectivity in what one imagines.

But such understanding of collectivity is very different from how the word collective imagination has been used recently in urban planning literature. What scholars refer to as collective imagination is the process of agreeing on a certain vision of the future. The assumption is that each person has their own image of the future, they can communicate that image in its entirety, and so they can discuss and come up with a shared vision of the future. Anything that comes after one’s image of the future has nothing to do with the imagination anymore. Agreeing on a certain image of the future cannot be referred to as collective imagination.

The other issue with calling such practices collective imagination is that it opens up one’s image of the future to evaluation and judgement by others. So compared to what we use to evaluate, your plan, your action, you intention and your creative work, we are now talking about evaluating your imagination, violating the space where you could freely think about any potential scenario for the future.

Moral Imagination

The same problem is with the phrase moral imagination. I have seen variations of this phrase being used over and over again in talking about how our visions of the future should be sustainable, inclusive and democratic.

In one of the events I attended the speakers were giving examples of the exercise they did with their students. They have asked their students to imagine how the world would look like in 2070. One of the students had come up with this vision that it would be full of fancy cars flying around and tall buildings all over the city. The speaker then showed the way the student had communicated his vision and said: “The students are so consumed by capitalism that they didn’t even realise their imagination is so immoral”. In another one they talked about trainings to teach you how to imagine.

My jaw dropped. We have reached a point in violating one's mind that we are not even allowing people to imagine the future without judging them. We are defining frameworks for what is the ‘right’ way of imagining. Wouldn't this defy the whole idea and value of imagination as a space of possibility, freedom, and expansion of thought?

Imagination-led design

Can you think of a design which is not led by imagination? isn’t imagining the most basic step in design? So why imagination-led design? Because none of the words mean what they actually used to mean. Design over the years has become so structured, put in a formula and argued as something doable by anyone, we now need to add imagination-led design to imply a type of problem-solving that is less structured, more individual and more geared towards the future. In a way using the word imagination is more to rescue the concept of design rather than highlighting the value of imagination itself.

The overall trend is now to use imagination to replace practices which we once referred to as creative thinking, problem solving, and future thinking. The trend that will only lead to imagination joining the long list of empty signifiers in the time when it is needed the most.

Imagination is the Next Victim

Save It Before It’s Too Late

Author: Moozhan Shakeri

Published On: 09/01/2024