Elsevier

Futures

Volume 132, September 2021, 102788
Futures

Collaborative imagination: A methodological approach

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2021.102788Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • Imagination is an innate faculty that is developed through methods and practices.

  • Imagination is crucial for developing self-efficacy, agency and long-term survival.

  • We present three case studies that led to our Imaginative Collaborative Framework.

  • Our framework includes details about conditions, processes, and outputs.

Abstract

This paper explores the role of imagination as our primary cognitive mechanism for anticipating and deliberating on the future, and adopts the perspective that imagination is an innate human faculty that can be developed and deployed through particular methods and practices. Imagination is a crucial component for individual self-efficacy, collective agency, and our broader capacity for long-term survival and thriving as a species, driving fundamental advances in all arenas of human activity, from technological innovation to literature and the arts. We present a set of three case studies that we used to build our Imaginative Collaborative Framework, which aims to foster imagination within interdisciplinary teams. This framework extends research on collaboration to specifically account for, and foster, imagination, and identifies three primary areas of practice: creating conditions, defining processes, and shaping outputs.

Keywords

Imagination
Interdisciplinary
Methodology
Narrative
Framework

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