On Imagination
Infrastructure, Optimism, and the Question of the Radical
Someone I worked with came back after his father died to the same screen where we usually met. We were not close and would only see each other as squares on Zoom tiles. I said what you say, “I can’t imagine what you’re going through but I’m here if you want to talk.” He nodded, said thank you, and the meeting continued.
I thought about that sentence for a long time. It was the right (and available) thing to say and I did not regret saying it. I couldn’t, however, help but notice the sentence’s announcement of inability. It is a part of an imaginative act to recognise that there is somewhere he is, and that somewhere is hard, and I am not in it. The sentence performs an imagination’s refusal of itself and offers that refusal as a kind of consolidation.
This is not how imagination is usually regarded in where I work. In design, in futures research, in foresight workshops and reports and speculative projects that fill the field, imagination is what we are urged to do. To expand, to mobilise, to deploy in service of visions, scenarios, preferable worlds. It is a forward-facing faculty, an instrument of optimism, the mechanism of the not-yet. It is what gets us to 2050.
What I want to do here is to approach imagination from a different direction. I am interested in imagination as something that happens between us, present tense, and particular. Imagination as a mode of relation rather than a mode of production.
Infrastructure of Imagination
On Sunday afternoons in the outskirts of a Belgian town, a group of scout children gathered to play. Days before that, the scout leaders met in a student dorm to plan how the play would happen. They thought about the weather, the materials, the age of the children, the coordination with the parents, and what worked the weeks before. The play felt unscripted on Sunday, but it was highly orchestrated in advance.
Years ago for my master’s degree, I spent some time with these scout leaders, watching them craft the work that produced the play. What struck me then, and what I would like to return to now, is that much of what we usually call imagination had already happened before the children arrived. The Sunday activities within the transcendental circle of play was imagining, but it was imagining inside an imagining by other people.
Webb Keane1 has argued that imagination is a patterned, culturally elaborated practice through which beings come to matter to one another. In this sense, the scout leaders were not having an inner experience of imagining and then expressing it on Sunday. Their imagining is a practice. They imagined by holding meetings, by constructing fun-elements, by making lists, by organising with the parents, and by gathering in the field early.
Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim2 have given a name to the larger versions of these collective practices: Sociotechnical Imaginaries. They use the term to refer to the collectively held, institutionally stabilised visions of desirable futures that are publicly performed and animated by shared understandings of the forms of life and order that a society can attain through scientific and technological advancement. Sociotechnical imaginaries are engrained in policy, priorities, legal frameworks, strategies and discourses, all of which stem from specific beliefs and values that fuel the very craft of imagining. In other words, when we imagine, we do not start from nothing.
A more interesting question for me is which collective practices get to count as imagination. The scout leaders’ planning meeting is recognisable as a practice of imagination. The children’s enacting different characters in the field is recognisable as imagination. The parents’ arrangements that made the children available are also patterned, elaborated, a kind of imaginative work that produces the conditions under which the imagined Sunday can happen. But often they are not called imagination. They are called administration, care work, or the things one simply has to do.
This selection is what I mean by the infrastructure of imagination. It is the prior, mostly invisible distribution that decides which patterned practices count as imagination and which does not. This infrastructure is what determines that a speculative designer’s near future kitchen counts as an imagined future, while my nurse friend’s daily improvisation around under-resourced ward does not. The former is imagination; the latter is just coping.
Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby3, whose work has shaped a generation of speculative design, describe design as a way of imagining possible futures, by posing what if questions that open up alternatives to the way things are. What it does not name, though, is that the designation of speculative design as imagination is itself a social fact by which particular practice has been recognised, equipped, funded, exhibited, while many other practices through which futures are imagined into being have not. Is speculative design is more imaginative than the care worker’s improvisation or is it simply more recognised as imaginative?
To take imagination seriously as a social practice is, therefore, to ask which practices have been allowed to count. The scout leaders’ Sunday imagination practice is a small instance of the larger arrangement by which certain people develop the equipment and the legitimacy to imagine activities for other people, while the imaginative labour of others is reclassified as something else. The infrastructure that lets us imagine is the same infrastructure that makes it unnecessary to stay true to various lives. But to imagine is different from to live what is imagined. To stay true to the lived, our task as imagination workers might be to honour practices on the edges of what we know as imagination.
Imagination-Optimism
I can’t imagine what you’re going through does not produce a preferable future. In fact, it does not produce a future at all. Yet it is one of the most demanding acts of imagination we may ask of each other. To say it as to mean it requires the recognition that there is a somewhere the other person is, the acknowledgment that you are not in it, and the willingness to remain present anyway. The sentence is imagination at its most relational and least productive. And perhaps for exactly this reason, it is the kind of imagination that does not show up in design futures.
What shows up in design futures is imagination of a different temperament. It is forward-moving, generative, and oriented toward alternatives. It produces scenarios, propositions, and provocations. Even at its most critical, it produces. It is imagination organised around the question what could be otherwise, and that question, however probing, is always optimistic. To ask what could be otherwise is to suppose the otherwise is reachable, that the imagining is in some sense a step toward it.
Here I would like to clarify that I do not view optimism as inherently bad. However, what I want to name is something slightly more structural. Optimism in imagining futures is a condition of admission. Imaginative work that does not present itself as forward-moving, that does not propose, that does not yield something, struggles to be recognised as imagination at all. It is, instead, seen as paralysis, stagnation, grief, or unhelpfulness. And the place for these type of work is the present.
This is why so much of the imaginative work that goes on in the world goes unnoticed by the field. The mother improvising the week’s meals from what’s affordable is imagining. She is imagining within the constraint of what is, not toward what could be. The nurse who knows the ward will be short-staffed again tomorrow and prepares accordingly is imagining, but the imagining is rehearsal for endurance, not vision. The son who sits with his father through a long illness is imagining constantly what the other needs at this hour, but the imagining proposes no alternative. They are all imaginative practices, but of attention, attendance, adaptation, and patience4.
Admitting these into what we count as imagination means we have to give up the assumption that imagination is hopeful by default. Hope may be one of imagination’s registers but it is certainly not the only one. Imagination is also what we do when we know things cannot be fixed. The field’s pull toward optimism, however well intentioned, has narrowed what we are willing to call imaginative, and in doing so, it removes itself from depth and motions outward towards ignorance.
Radical Imagination
The word radical has done a lot of work in recent years. Its root is radix, which means root. To be radical is to excavate downward to the root of a thing, to reach what underlies it, what nourishes it, and what holds it out of sight. The word is not about boldness or transgression. It is an unearthing movement into the core.
Lately, Radical, in design discourse has come to mean strikingly different. A radical proposal is one that breaks expectations. A radical future is one that diverges sharply from the present. A radical imagination is one that produces unfamiliar visions. It involves movement away, on the surface in a horizontal direction, rather than vertical movement downward into what produces the surface in the first place. A speculative object that looks strange is not radical. It is unusual, which is a different thing.
If we take the etymology seriously, then most of what is called radical imagination is not radical at all. It is surface variation within an unchanged ground. These variations may be valuable in that they disturb, provoke, open conversations, but they leave the root untouched. They do not ask what makes their imagining possible, who has not been in the imagined, and what counts as a future at all.
To go to the root perhaps is not a matter of imagining more boldly, but of asking what the practice of imagining is built on and whether the foundations are what we assume. I propose two main movements: 1) the refusal of the imagined/lived split, and 2) the examination of the imagination as a concept.
Imagined and real are kept apart so that the imagining can be safely performed. Speculative objects can be radical-seeming because everyone knows it is not real. The 2050 scenario can propose anything because no one will have to live in it as proposed. The protection of the imagined from the real is what makes the field of futures possible and also what makes its products mostly inconsequential to the futures actually being lived in the present.
To go to the root is to refuse this protection. It is to insist that imagination has consequences, that what is imagined draws on what is lived, that the imagined and the real are not different ontological regions but continuous textures of the same world.
The second movement is the assumption that imagination is the faculty of the new, the generative, the unprecedented — made from nothing. As we have established in previous sections, imagination is a practice of someone’s lived reality, somewhere, somewhen, situated in the beliefs and values of the society. Every imagining draws on a particular ground. To go to the root is to ask what ground, and whose, and on what terms it has been drawn upon.
The challenge is to go deeper than to be more inclusive, more participatory, or more diverse and to start with examining how we participate in the recognised imagination practice without questioning the practice itself. It is also to recognise someone’s practices of imagining within their constraint, adaptation, and endurance in their own term. A radical imagination would notice that a grandmother has been imagining all along, and that the question is not simply how to include her in a workshop but how to learn from what she has been doing.
Radical imagination, then, needs to start with two refusals: the separation between the imagined and the lived, because that separation is what allows imagination to be performed without consequence, and the false assumption that imagination begins from nothing, because that assumption is what allows the imaginer to forget certain lives.
What remains is imagination as attendance5 and futures as continuity.
Keane's focus is specifically moral imagination but his account of imagination as interactional and embedded in practice, rather than as internal to persons, can be applied to understanding imagination more broadly. See Webb Keane, Animals, Robots, Gods: Adventures in the Moral Imagination (London: Penguin Books, 2025).
Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim, eds., Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).
This mode of imagination is close to Tim Ingold’s concept of “attandance,” appeared particularly in his books The Life of Lines (London: Routledge, 2015) and Correspondences (Cambridge: Polity, 2020). For Ingold, attendance means being with things rather than observing them from distance. It is an active, ongoing engagement with things, people, and the world.
Ibid.