Imaginary Innovation
Our principal theme here at Coimaginations is imaginary innovation. Let's unpack that.
Our lives and world are shaped by imaginaries. Imaginaries include: stories, narratives, policies, institutions, blueprints, protocols, patterns, countries, identities, social technologies, rules, laws, concepts, relationships, and more.
The common factor in all of these is that these are not inherently material realities — they exist first in the realm of ideas. Which is to say: they are imagined. This doesn't make them less 'real', but it does mean that they exist in the domain of logical and social instead of material reality.
If imaginaries aren't material, how do they affect material things? The answer is: we follow them. The water you wash your hands with probably came out of a tap designed based on imaginary blueprints, piped there from reservoirs built by imaginary institutions paying imaginary promises of future value (money) to people who engaged in imaginary contracts, which they probably expected imaginary governments would help them enforce in the event of imaginary violations. Chances are, these people had come from places imagined to be in 'other' imaginary countries or cultures, and they needed imaginary passports to cross imaginary borders that might themselves have been materially marked with walls and fences.
You get the idea.
The point is: imaginaries are a Big Deal in shaping our world and our lives. But they also have lives and lifespans of their own. Every imaginary had a time before it existed, or was recognized, conceived, identified, discovered, drafted, chartered, or enacted. History is full of discarded, disused, and discredited imaginaries. How did some come to be, spread, become adopted, disappeared?
That's what we're interested in here at Coimaginations. Specifically, we're interested in these through the lens of innovation (lit. new value). How do imaginaries change, and how do these changes affect value (and for whom)? And where and how, along the way, do and can people change them?