Collaborative imagination: A methodological approach

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.