Design, Agency and Pragmatic Imagination

The books “Pragmatic Imagination” and “Design Unbound” from Ann Pandleton-Jullian and JSB ( John Seely Brown) explore to a great detail the need for new creative “imagination” into a practical form.
The reasoning builds on the ideas of entanglement, expressed in my previous entry.

A great lecture from 2015 is availavle on the video-section of the website.
The book and lecture starts from the TIMN – Tribes, Institutions, Markets, Networks framework of RAND researcher David Ronfeldt. rom there it shows the raise of complexity, difference in agency, and how to evolve.

Ann Pendleton-Jullian defines Imagination not as artistic or creativity, but related to agency, contingency, possibility and propensities of a (non-linear, networked, contingent) system.
The only way to understand such complex systems is the use of imagination: a image-making cognitive process of the mind, we use when we’re reasoning, when we’re perceiving something new (or in a new way). Imagination is only good to us if it can be instrumentalized, structured into a rich structured way.
Imagination is cognitive activity covert in nature, that even works when we perceive something strange for the first time and have to wrestle with ‘what does it mean’ – The only way is to say “I think I can imagine it means this”, calling out images from the past …

Different from top-down strategic plans, which organize phased management of an operational pathway aimed at a goal, or tactical responses that create incremental improvement —both of which have value under conditions that are stable, knowable, and hierarchically organized—ecologies of change are specifically useful for working on complex problems and shaping change in a white water world.

JSB on Design Unbound

The richness of design unbound (having Pragmatic Imagination as epilogue), can be discovered at the official website, where all chapters have a summary.