An introduction to CoLab Dudley’s approach to Imagination Infrastructuring

“There is a big need for new forms of imaginative practice.” Hilary Cottam: Radical Way, 2021

As Hilary Cottam makes clear in her recent research into shifting away from the existing failing social paradigm, there is an urgent need for imaginative practice. However, in the context of a collective imagination deficit, (Rob Hopkins, 2019) imaginative practice requires nurturing conditions, it requires imagination infrastructure.

Just as our energy, communication or transport infrastructures are a shared public resource that we all rely upon to enable our daily lives, our imagination infrastructure is a critical public resource that will shape our futures. Without imagination infrastructure — intentionally designed with, for and by everyone — we will fail to disrupt Business as Usual ideas, practices, behaviours and structures. The Business as Usual narrative (or Horizon 1 framing) currently encourages a culture of individualism and extraction that is accelerating climate emergency shaped futures. We need collective imagination infrastructure to support us to imagine alternatives, and to take action together for healthier and more joyful futures for all peoples and the planet we share. We need a form of infrastructure that nurtures what Annika Hansteen-Izora calls communal dreaming.

“In this way, dreaming is a form of time travel. It is a seed rooted in the past, nurtured in the present, and looks towards possibilities in the future.” Annika Hansteen-Izora, 2021

Our health and the planet’s health are interdependent. We can not respond to health inequalities in our communities without this understanding of interdependency — of inter-being. This requires the communal dreaming up of new regenerative imaginaries for the near and distant futures for our towns and neighbourhoods (or Horizon 3 framing). For this we require imagination infrastructure that puts imagination at the core of civic life.

“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.” Ed Finn and Ruth Whylie, 2021 (h/t Cassie Robinson)

What is Imagination Infrastructure?

“This infrastructure will be more than a set of foundations or a scaffold. It will look, in fact, more like a playground: which exists, not subordinate to or below some other, more important work, but as a structure in its own right, one which supports, co-creates, and constantly re-produces play, creativity, imagination. Not something which can be taken away once the work is done, but which is itself the work — continually revisited, made new, repurposed, infrastructured, to be used by communities, leaders and networks to collectively imagine better futures.” Olivia Oldham (2021)

“Conventionally infrastructure has been defined as operational systems such as roads, railways and resource management. Design Council, and many others, expands this to include the building blocks of communities such as affordable housing, health services, technology services and ways to build communities resilience and imagination. This wider definition allows us to take a holistic approach to support inclusive places.” Cat Drew — Design Council

We are grateful to have learnt so very much from those exploring and advocating for the intentional development of imagination infrastructure. The work of Cassie Robinson, Indy Johar and Dark Matter Labs, Amahra Spence and MAIA Group, Anab Jain of Superflex, Ella Saltmarshe and Beatrice Pembroke of The Long Time Project, Civic Square’s Department of Dreams, Annika Hansteen-Izora, and Rob Hopkins ‘What is to What If?’ book and podcast, have all been instrumental in our learning journey as they have convened conversations that connect fellow imagineers and curated fabulous archives of their imagination infrastructuring in action. Their generous, hopeful and determined open learning, connecting, weaving and working out loud helps build this interconnected and incredibly multifaceted field of social change practice intent on dreaming a better world into reality. As Sophia Parker stresses in this invitation from the Emerging Futures work she is heading up at JRF “This is a collaborative endeavour — so get in touch”

Imagination infrastructure is as diverse as the world we live in. It can manifest in any space, discipline, time, sector, group, ecology, geography, governance, assemblage or material. This can make it tricky to pin down and understand — the most helpful description we have encountered is by Olivia Oldham here. While this collective imagination playbook collated as part of Emerging Futures work offers a joyful dive into what it describes as a ‘pluriverse of practice’.

In simple terms, the purpose of imagination infrastructure for us, is to support collective public imagining and creative action for regenerative futures in Dudley.

“Co-creating a regenerative future is about supporting people, places and cultures to express their unique contribution to the health and vitality of the nested complexity in which we are embedded. To do so simultaneously serves ourselves, our communities and life as a whole.” Wahl, 2021

As a collective of creatives, artists, makers, architects, researchers, community development workers and designers in Dudley borough we have taken inspiration from fellow travellers and experimented and added our own learning to this growing pot of shared wisdom. We hope the examples of imagination infrastructure(ing) below inspire, provoke and catalyse even more collective imagining in Dudley.

CoLab Dudley, Time Rebels and Imagination Infrastructure

As a lab we wanted to share examples and experiments by CoLab Dudley and a constellation of Time Rebels in Dudley that highlight imagination infrastructure that is intentionally place based and therefore perhaps more knowable. This work embraces place based wisdom and all the specificity AND multiplicity that comes with that. That is not to say it doesn’t invite from and draw insights from outside that place, quite the reverse, it has porous boundaries, however, the focus is always upon the conditions for, and manifestations of imagination and regenerative futures in Dudley, in the West Midlands.

This is all relatively new for us. Some of it feels like navigating uncharted territory, some of it more familiar with roots and rhythms in our values led social change, principles and systems work. So we continue to be grateful for the generosity of working out loud by learning partners, and if any of this resonates with you and your dreams and practices in Dudley borough please do get in touch — let’s learn and imagine together.

Over the last few years we have noticed some key common qualities in our lab and Time Rebel imagination infrastructuring in Dudley. Some qualities have been intentional in the infrastructure design, some have been emergent and organic as we experimented together along the way. These are by no means intended as an exhaustive list, or as static prescription for imagination infrastructuring. Rather, noticing these patterns is an act of open learning around what imagination infrastructuring looks and feels like for us as a lab team and collective of Time Rebels at this moment in time (Spring, 2022).

Imagination infrastructuring is — about creating conditions for collective imagining as part of our wider cultural strategy practice as a lab.

Cultural strategy practice tells us we can be intentional in nurturing shifts in the cultural landscape, the infrastructures that shape it, the practices and behaviours that animate it, and the myths and narratives that breathe life into it. Culture and imagining are intertwined and therefore imagination infrastructuring is critical to nurturing alternative cultures to those that have enabled the environmental and social crises we face. Collective imagining is critical to the emergence of regenerative cultures in the Borough.

“[c]ulture is our collective imaginary, and it is the stage on which our vision for the future will be decided. How we produce culture and how we imagine the future are part of the same process, something we are beginning to learn here from aboriginal communities.” Reset Arts and Culture, 2021

In practice — This interlinkage of culture and imagining has become even more explicit in the lab work in the last two or three years of Time Rebel experiments and festival platforms that seek to reimagine the High Street as a kinder, more creative and connected public space. Through our lab cultural mapping and engaged research we have come to see this interaction between cultural strategy and imagination infrastructuring as essential to change and better futures.

Imagination infrastructure is — definitely a verb for us.

We like how others in this field of practice have described this ‘doing’ quality of imagination infrastructure as ‘infrastructuring’. So for us as a lab and constellation of Time Rebels it is manifest in the focus upon conditions for everyday imagining, doing and experimenting in place. It is as much the process, the methods and the practice as the thing that gets created or experienced. It is the imagining-creating-learning loop that flows through experiments and the design of the infrastructure.

“Infrastructuring can be considered as a framework for thinking about design activities in more emergent terms (Karasti and Syrjänen 2004, Marttila & Botero 2017). In Participatory Design (PD), infrastructuring has been used to describe the long-term work of ‘aligning humans and non-human actors (technologies, resources, spaces) towards the emergence of new practices’ (Seravalli 2018, 3). Infrastructuring therefore, is a term used to describe the ongoing work of making and sustaining infrastructures. The use of the gerund, seeks to emphasise the processual nature of infrastructures, rather than their tangible manifestations.” (Kristen Moegerlaein, 2019)

In practice — For example, it means holding space and thoughtfully convening for the learning, dreaming, connecting and creative thinking, as well as the co-creation and testing in place of projects to spark imaginations. So during our festival of doing, Do Fest Dudley 2021, Time Rebels shared insights regarding the way their experiments and time rebel practice invited new narratives of place and so new relationships with the High St that might begin to reveal new forms of stewardship. Visitors, workers, residents to the High Street were invited to ask, experience, feel, and imagine a range of What If questions that reframed the civic purpose of the High Street as a place of play, creation, mapping, connection, curiosity, collage, storytelling, poetry and more. This flow of curiosity, creativity, place based wisdom and experimenting as part of infrastructuring is also wonderfully illustrated with the collective evolution of Street Detectorism.

Imagination infrastructuring is — a practice of interconnectedness that acts in support of relational socio-ecological change (Kristen Moegerlaein, 2019).

For example, by nurturing place-based cultural ecologies that build and democratise creative and imaginative capacity and activity in the locality. Or through creating experiments and spaces for shared learning, sense making and doing flows that encourage connectivity and knowledge exchange. This relational approach to imagination infrastructuring is being co-designed and tested within umbrella charitable organisations (Dudley CVS — voluntary sector infrastructure), community forums (Brierley Hill Community Forum’s Cultural Consortium) and collectives of local creatives and designers.

In practice — The Time Rebel experiment has been designed to nurture collaboration, co-design and collective creative action that comes through a process and practice that has a relational focus. You can follow this link to our Time Rebel practice pages in notion pulled from the Time Rebel shared learning enquiry in 2021. Similarly, the stream of engaged research and cultural animation with local creatives as part of a wider cultural strategy practice has a focus upon collaboration, reciprocity and symbiosis that is nurtured through this relational approach to infrastructuring.

Imagination infrastructuring is — tangible and intangible, but is always related to the specificity of place.

We have tended to view this presence and nurturing of connection to place as manifest in expressions of sense of place, place based wisdom and new relationships to place as a further aspect of our relational approach to infrastructuring.

In practice — This can be an actual space to dream together (like a shop unit or High Street), or it can be a digital archive of imagination inspiration rooted in the everyday detail, memories, artefacts, dreams and stories of that place. This is beautifully illustrated through the Poetry of Place by Time Rebel Rick and through Growing Up in Dudley, a series of creative and participatory projects convened by lab member and Time Rebel Dave O’Coy that all begin with memories of place. Equally, the wonderfully rich Stories of Place ‘lake’ — a type of digital treasure chest that holds and weaves together multiple micro and macro stories of Dudley that is open to anyone to add to. While our Time Rebel Wiki and Digital Allotment hold local facts and figures, ideas, stories, experiments, shared learning, creative and cultural artefacts that gently weave, inspire and encourage flows that productively join dots across systems, cultural divides, and geographies. This form of infrastructure is intended to help nurture the conditions for more shared and distributed imagination infrastructuring across the Borough.

Imagination infrastructuring is — a vehicle for collective dreaming and co-creation.

It is always co-created intentionally with and for the people and more-than-human of Dudley. This is their infrastructure. A form of imagination commons!

In practice — Time Rebel and BCU student Kirren Channa invited more-than-human collective stories of Dudley High Street manifest in an evocative assemblage of collages and poems. While Time Rebel and Extinction Rebellion Architecture student Jasmine Lawrence — inspired by data humanism introduced in Street Detectorism by team member Holly Doron — created stunning tapestries illustrating deep time in Dudley and collective stories on the High Street. You can read about these stories and more about other co-created Stories of Place here. We are also excited by a new project on Dudley High Street called Radio Public — led by lab creative partners Bill and Helen of Workshop 24 — that embraces and builds upon this quality of imagination infrastructuring that invites a collective co-creation and dreaming.

Imagination infrastructuring is — at the core of our practice of nurturing connections and relationships.

Enabling alternative just futures for the Borough requires collective imagining. For this reason we centre the conditions for imagination in all our relationships, and especially in our collaborations.

In practice — Here we have outlined a friendly guide to collaborating with the lab that illustrates this focus upon imagination. The guide has developed from shared learning with creative partners and time rebels.

Imagination infrastructuring is — testing and sharing tools within our collective that support imagination infrastructure design and animation.

Trying them out together, reworking them for different projects, circling back round to reflect on their value — doing this all in the open and sharing it in a range of creative mediums — is an aspect of our infrastructuring that we hope helps support the wider field.

In practice — Here you can see how we have been testing out and sharing the Imagination Sundial by Rob Shorter.

Imagination infrastructure is — a social and ecological justice issue that intentionally prioritises a long time view.

By drawing insights from the past and wisdom inherited, as well as asking us to be dreaming, caring and thinking about the lives of many generations ahead, this infrastructure is mindful of who gets to imagine and who/ what thrives in that imagined future.

In practice — For example, as a social lab and platform — we have developed GUIDEing principles that includes a North Star principle to ‘Be Good Ancestors’ — to inform our day to day and more long term decision making in the design and practice of infrastructuring. This principle (and the ideas articulated by Roman Kraznaric) have shaped the design of our Time Rebel experiment, bringing together all sorts of people from across the Borough, that want to think about, test out, and co-create experiments that spark public imagination around long term and legacy thinking for their community and planet. Similarly, our newest experiment is a peer to peer learning journey, supported by learning partners Civic Square and Enrol Yourself, to learn about and test out ideas inspired by Doughnut Economics. Doughnut Economics is an approach to economics developed by Kate Raworth that cares for both humans and the planet. At the heart of this peer to peer learning infrastructure is imagining the doughnut at the neighbourhood level and using creative and imaginative ways to inspire local people to take action. One Time Rebel project ‘Stitchers in Time’ is a group that comes together regularly to combine historical images, photos, maps, illustrations that they then embellish with collage, applique, stitching to tell stories from the past and imagine the future. Meanwhile, the More-than-human High St invited passers by and visitors to the High St to reframe and imagine the High Street as a place we share with the more-than-human invoking ideas of entanglement and collective stewardship.

Imagination infrastructuring is — an approach that can encourage experiments that in time emerge as forms of imagination infrastructure or platforms in their own right (i.e. an imagination infrastructuring approach that nurtures multiple infrastructures).

These infrastructures are often mutually supportive and the sites of creative collaboration. They are catalysts for ways of being and doing that offer a discontinuity from the existing status quo. These new manifestations of infrastructure aren’t just newly formed structures, they are also emerging in learning and action experiments within pre-existing structures. This form of imagination infrastructuring can manifest in the re-imagining of the form, purpose, and practices of parts of these pre-existing structures. It results in the interconnection and symbiosis of previously separate or seemingly unrelated areas of public value through imaginative practice.

In practice — Afro Histories Dudley and the Black Creatives Network led by Time Rebel Dionne has emerged in this Time Rebel constellation supported by the lab. As has Dudley People’s Archive which captures and cares for and reimagines everyday popular cultural artefacts and stories. Both forms of imagination infrastructure offer what lab member Lorna describes here as a discontinuity from the current way of being and doing. They act as a living breathing form of inclusive cultural heritage stewarded for future generations, while also inspiring creativity and reimagining of what that local heritage means today and into the future. Similarly, the Lab has created an open living library or ‘digital allotment of shared learning and curiosity in action’ that holds and brings into relationship lots of different local cultural knowledge, stories, places and people. This digital allotment is a decade long piece of imagination infrastructure to help the emergence of long term, democratic and healthy cultural ecologies in Dudley Borough. The health of these ecologies will in part determine creative capacities, the emergence of new forms of imagination infrastructure, and critically who gets to create and imagine in the Borough.

Imagination infrastructure is — a way to create space for and bring intention to imagination in the everyday and ordinary of that place

— in the High Street, a car park, a road, a bench, an alleyway, a drainpipe, a bus stop, a bin, a street sign, a street hoarding, a disused park, an empty building, or unloved green space. There is a disruption to the everyday narrative that runs through this place based imagination infrastructuring that asks “what if these things that often reflect and in turn shape who we are and what we value, were imagined differently”?

In practice — Time Rebels have lifted up the essence of place so that the ‘everyday’ becomes a catalyst for imagination and alternative futures rooted in the lived experience of Dudley today. You can learn more about the new narratives and relationships to place these invite in: Poetry of Place, Stories of Place, Birmingham City University students Future High Street, and Do Fest Dudley.