A collaborative project developed in collaboration with eight research groups from four Universities of Applied Sciences, aimed at researching and developing creative methods for solving social issues.
In the project ‘Imagination in Transitions’, eight research groups from four applied sciences universities work together. Researchers from the Amsterdam University of the Arts, the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Inholland and the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences investigate with partners how creative methods can help to work on social challenges in an inclusive way.
More concretely, the researchers deploy various design, artistic and making approaches, test them and research their mechanisms in order to find out how imagination can help with these changes, create connections and increase our collective ability to solve complex challenges. These challenges must be understood in the context of global, far-reaching change processes or transitions. Our premise is that imagination can play an important role in dealing with these transitions. Imagination can help us to better understand complexity and to make other futures imaginable and tangible.
Together with others, we investigate what imagination can mean in transitions, in establishing connections and in increasing collective problem-solving capacity. We work in the context of mission-driven research, with agendas that direct towards the further development of so-called Key Enabling Methodologies.
Their key methodology consists of a collection of creative practices that approach concrete issues from a number of common starting points that have to do with finding underlying questions, thinking beyond divisions, working in a participatory way, having a critical lens, embracing uncertainty and serendipity, and organizing slow processes with room for attention.