This Handbook will help you to create a playful and creative space for your community where they:
Inspired by Rob Hopkins’ book From What Is to What If– and recognising the need for creative spaces, collaborative networks and the power of the imagination – Cambridge Carbon Footprint collaborated with Hilary Cox Condron – now their Imaginarium Artist in Residence – to launch the first Cambridge Imaginarium at The Cambridge Festival in 2022.
Since that first event in 2022 many more Imaginariums have been hosted in Cambridgeshire, attracting thousands of visitors in a variety of settings. They’ve ranged from very creative, hands-on painting and modelling at the ‘Shrink Lab’, which invited families with young children to think about shrinking their footprint to help nature thrive, to ‘Reimagining Community Energy’, which hosted energy experts for talks and information stalls in a village hall. In all cases, Imaginariums have provided an inspiring environment which sparked the imagination and resources and tools for visitors to express their thoughts alongside ‘experts’. They have included short films, creative installations, soundscapes, discussion groups and inspiration cards to spark ideas.
For organisations wanting to understand and nourish the ambitions of communities, Imaginariums are a great engagement tool. They can be used with all age groups, by all hosts in many settings; from a school wanting to explore becoming an eco-school to a business wanting to reduce its environmental impact, from council officers wanting to consult on climate and biodiversity strategies to green groups working up Neighbourhood Plans. To date, hosts have included parish councils, local authorities, environmental groups and colleges. They’ve been held outside under marquees, at festivals, in village halls and shopping centres. They can be one off pop-up events or a series, whatever fits your needs.
To see what a large scale Imaginarium can be like, see the write-up from our partners on the Imaginarium Takeover at King’s from the fantastic Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination.
¨We do have the capability to effect dramatic change, but we’re failing because we’ve largely allowed our most critical tool to languish: human imagination. As defined by social reformer John Dewey, imagination is the ability to look at things as if they could be otherwise. The ability, that is, to ask What if? And if there was ever a time when we needed that ability, it is now.Imagination is central to empathy, to creating better lives, to envisioning and then enacting a positive future. Yet imagination is also demonstrably in decline at precisely the moment when we need it most. In this passionate exploration, Hopkins asks why imagination is in decline, and what we must do to revive and reclaim it. Once we do, there is no end to what we might accomplish.¨
“We have built education systems, businesses, economies and societies based on what we can measure, evidence, and rationalise, over what we can dream of, create, wonder, or hope for. Over time, this has resulted in a collective depletion in our innate capacity for imagination. The costs of this are now clearly in evidence.”
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