Imagination is a socially shaped, foundational human capacity that is critical for navigating complexity, challenging dominant systems and shaping more just and desirable futures. It must be reclaimed from narrow, instrumental understandings—especially those that conflate it with creativity or reduce it to market-driven outputs—and instead cultivated as a collective, ethical and political practice.
Practical imagination refers to the human capacity to project beyond immediate perception, navigate contradiction and generate meaning in conditions of uncertainty. It is not merely an extension of creativity nor a decorative faculty confined to the arts. Rather, it is a foundational dimension of cognition, culture and collective life—shaping how individuals and societies relate to time, possibility and change. 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 actionable.
The social sorting of imagination in education
Creativity and imagination are often conflated, particularly in business and design environments. This confusion begins early in schools, where children who can draw, sing or play an instrument are labeled as ‘the creatives.’ Other forms of imaginative thinking—such as empathy, storytelling, systems thinking or problem-framing—often go unrecognized. From a young age, creativity becomes associated with artistic performance and those who do not exhibit these traits are subtly or explicitly positioned as non-creative. This early social sorting shapes lifelong access to creative opportunities and identities.
Those who do not express themselves through recognizable artistic behaviors are often perceived as less creative, despite engaging in complex and innovative thinking in other domains. This early sorting not only shapes identity but reinforces the idea that imagination belongs to certain kinds of people doing culturally sanctioned kinds of work.
As cultural theorist Raymond Williams has argued, restricting creative value to elite artistic production obscures the social and political functions of imagination. It sidelines the creative labor embedded in care work activism, community survival strategies and everyday sensemaking. Limiting imagination and creativity to specific professions and outputs means institutions deny their role as universal human capacities and reinforce a classed and racialized division of labor.
The social nature of imaginaries
Imaginaries are always social by nature. They are the set of representations specific to one or more social groups: myths, religious and spiritual imaginaries, utopias, mythologies, technological and commercial imaginaries. As Pierre Ansart says, this meaning-generating totality is part of the common life, of social practices. It is these connections, these implications of the symbolic that are of particular interest in the practice of innovation and design.
Imaginaries are sets of shared social references that allow us to produce and maintain coherence in the work of imagination, design and innovation. They are the raw material of the innovation process that is realized in objects, works or technologies. The production of material goods and financial practices themselves—too often considered devoid of imaginative creativity—also relies on representations of the future. A financial policy, however much it may be bound to calculations and figures, elaborates scenarios of the future that are crucial because they contribute to the construction of the future.
Creativity versus imagination
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 something else entirely. It is not just the ability to make something new, but the capacity to hold together what is not yet fully known, to maintain contact with ambiguity and to construct meaning in the absence of certainty. It enables the projection of possibilities that cannot yet be tested, modeled or verified.
Imagination as an anthropological function
Imagination is also anthropological—it does not live solely in the mind, but is shaped by culture, language, memory, trauma and social positioning. It is a sense-making function that metabolizes contradiction, holding past and future in tension through the present. Anthropologists, sociologists and cultural theorists have long insisted that what people imagine and how they imagine, is inseparable from the social systems in which they live. Imagination draws from collective symbols, historical narratives and shared worldviews—shaped by structures of power, systems of classification and cultural memory.
For Arjun Appadurai, 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 free-floating; it is patterned by our position in the social field.
When Yo-Yo Ma described his childhood as an immigrant with Chinese parents living in France and moving to the United States at the age of seven, he spoke of how imagination became necessary. Navigating three sets of divergent worldviews was not just confusing—it demanded the creative construction of coherence across cultural discontinuities. Imagination, in his case, was not decorative. It was survival.
Imagination as cognitive mediation
In cognitive terms, imagination operates as a bridge between perception and meaning. When faced with novelty, the human mind instinctively draws on prior knowledge, memories and symbolic frameworks to make sense of what it encounters. This is not a neutral process. Meaning emerges through mediation: between a person, the object or event perceived and the cultural and historical frames through which interpretation occurs. Imagination is what allows that triangulation to function. Without it, unfamiliar experience remains unintelligible.
Embodied and intuitive dimensions
Ann Pendleton-Jullian explains how this capacity is not only practical—it is also performative and embodied. When we admire characters like Sherlock Holmes, it is not simply for their logic. Holmes, when asked if he has a solution, often answers with a number—“Yes, three” or “Yes, seven”—signaling the number of hypothetical scenarios he has already visualized. He doesn’t rely solely on deduction, but rather on the capacity to simulate divergent possibilities in his mind before testing them against evidence. Similarly, Magnus Carlsen has described his ability to play chess without looking at a board. He can hold entire positions in his head, not as static diagrams but as dynamic zones of potential and force. This kind of imaginative thinking fuses intuition, memory, visual reasoning and embodied pattern recognition. It moves across logic and sensation, calculation and affect.
Marginalization in dominant epistemologies
Despite its centrality to cognition, imagination remains marginalized in many disciplines. In economics, political science and even mainstream psychology, it is often dismissed as vague or irrational, overshadowed by more easily quantifiable faculties. Some thinkers, such as Shackle in economic theory, have made attempts to foreground imagination as a core mechanism of decision-making, but these efforts remain peripheral. What we often see instead are frameworks that claim to promote imaginative thinking but rest on shaky foundations.
Lateral thinking and its limitations
Edward de Bono’s concept of lateral thinking is one such example. Popular in design workshops and business culture, lateral thinking offers techniques like random stimulation and deliberate provocation as ways to break habitual thought patterns. Yet de Bono’s ideas have drawn sharp criticism from academics. Lateral thinking lacks peer-reviewed support and is often based on unverified anecdotes rather than empirical evidence. His ideas repackage older insights from Gestalt psychology and creative problem-solving without acknowledging their origins. While lateral thinking may help people disrupt routines, it offers no meaningful framework for understanding the social or cultural roots of imagination, nor does it engage with the politics of what is imagined, by whom and to what end.
Design, power and imaginary futures
In design, this absence of critical reflection is dangerous. Designers are not neutral facilitators. They participate in shaping the future, not only through the products or systems they build, but through the very ideas and images of the future they render plausible. Recent research in organizational studies points to this. In “The firm as an engine of imagination”, Bronk and Beckert argue that corporations are not just economic entities but producers of imaginaries. Their strategies, forecasts and design briefs function as narrative infrastructures that define what futures are seen as legitimate, profitable or inevitable. Designers working within such environments often become agents of these projections, reproducing the present under the guise of innovation.
Imagination as critical responsibility
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 to imagine otherwise. This means generating counter-imaginaries that do not simply compete within the logic of the existing system, but offer different logics altogether: logics of care, repair, mutuality and planetary stewardship.
Take, for instance, the visual language of smart cities. These futures are imagined through sleek dashboards, seamless infrastructure, frictionless mobility and AI-managed systems—representations that reproduce dominant imaginaries of efficiency, control and surveillance. They flatten complexity, often ignoring local cultures, histories or desires. Design here functions less as a site of democratic negotiation and more as an aesthetic performance of inevitability. By presenting highly managed, optimized futures as desirable, this imaginary forecloses possibilities for more inclusive, slower, messier and care-centered urban futures.
In this sense, practical imagination demands more than creativity—it requires refusal. It requires the courage to disrupt comfortable assumptions, to surface repressed histories and suppressed worldviews and to create friction against linear narratives of progress. It also demands relational thinking: a capacity to hold contradictions, to imagine across structural differences and to stay present with the tensions between what is and what could be.
To design with imagination as a responsibility is to design with consequence—not only for what is built, but for what is made imaginable and for whom. This work cannot be reduced to individual brilliance or brand distinction. It is at its heart a collective and ethical practice.
Decolonizing imagination
At the same time, imagination must be decolonized. The dominant modes of imagining the future—technocratic, extractivist, growth-driven—are not universal. They are specific to white, masculine, WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) subjectivities trained to equate imagination not only with control, scale and optimization, but also with entertainment, persuasion and seduction. Imagination is regularly instrumentalized to support the soft power of promotional culture—to help sell, to dramatize, to promise, to reassure. It operates at the service of dominant ideas and in doing so, it limits the capacity of individuals and institutions to imagine otherwise. These imaginaries are not neutral projections—they are infrastructures of power.
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 or domination. Alongside these traditions, countless creators artists and visionaries have used their imagination to confront power, illuminate injustice and expose the absurdity or violence of dominant systems. Their work reveals a form of critical creativity that refuses complicity, offering images, gestures and narratives that unsettle normative assumptions and open space for alternative modes of seeing, feeling and acting in the world.
Imagination and the making of preferable futures
Imagination plays a central role in creating preferable futures—futures that reflect not only what is plausible or probable, but what is desirable. 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.
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 trends. Imagination becomes the space where cognitive, emotional and cultural resources converge to articulate what a more just, regenerative or livable world could look like. In this sense, imagination is not only a mirror of our desires but also a tool for social critique and transformation.
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 capacity, it becomes possible to challenge what is framed as realistic or feasible and open new spaces for action.
Reclaiming imagination in education and design
Practical imagination, then, is not a luxury. It is a cultural and political practice. It refuses the idea that the future is something to be predicted or owned. Instead, it understands the future as something to be imagined with others, through contradiction and against the assumptions of the present. This requires transforming how imagination is popularly understood. In many educational and social contexts, children who are deeply imaginative—those who dream, invent or drift away from structured tasks—are often labeled as inattentive or distracted. Imaginative behavior is framed as a lack of discipline, rather than recognized as a vital cognitive and emotional resource. To reclaim imagination as a serious and socially valuable capacity, we must also challenge the ways our institutions punish it, repress it or pathologize it from an early age. It is through this orientation that design might recover its ethical force—not in building what comes next, but in asking who gets to imagine and who gets to live, the futures we bring into being.
If the Enlightenment was a revolution in thinking, the survival of the human species may well depend on a revolution in imagination. This revolution would not center reason and mastery, but interdependence, care and the capacity to imagine otherwise. It would demand that we challenge what we think is possible, not through extrapolation, but through attentiveness to what is ignored, denied or excluded. And it would require learning to imagine together—across difference across generations and across structural inequalities—in order to invent futures we actually want to inhabit. It would mean developing the capacity to unleash the full spectrum of human imagination and creativity—what might be called le génie humain—through elegant, socially embedded forms of innovation.
This revolution in imagination must take place within the constraints of our planetary boundaries—limits that any wise entrepreneur would recognize as the foundation for long-term resilience and value. It calls for unlocking human ingenuity not only in solving problems, but in shaping the conditions for broad-based well-being, entrepreneurial opportunity and social stability. By investing in the public infrastructures and institutional frameworks that enable creativity to flourish across society—not just in markets—we lay the groundwork for a future that is both dynamic and sustainable. Only then can we ensure that prosperity, innovation and justice are not mutually exclusive but mutually reinforcing.
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 committed to legacy, stewardship and impact, the invitation is clear: a revolution in imagination is not a detour from innovation—it is its most enduring and necessary foundation.