Wizards, Zeronaughts and flat-pack houses : The fine lines between reality and possibility
Rebecca Rieley (April 2014 Associate) digests the ideas of thinkers from sustainable business, housing and Harry Potter to find a new way to approach social problems.
When I started On Purpose, I was keen to dive in and explore the realities of the social issues prevalent in London and beyond. I wanted to use the year to learn as much as possible…but a few month’s into the programme, I had a nagging feeling that I was missing something.
I kept thinking back to an address that J K Rowling had given to the graduates of Harvard in 2008. I was struck by her decision to focus on imagination. Reflections on her address have encouraged me to think very differently about my concept of ‘reality’ in a social context.
Here’s what she said:
‘I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination…Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.’
When wanting to explore social realities, I had tended to start digging for data and the most respected reports on the issue at hand, putting my imagination to one side in search of the ‘realities’. But Rowling reminds us to put our imagination firmly back into our work and also to reconsider what it means to be imaginative. I think this alignment of imagination with empathy brings a humanising dimension to creativity that can be very useful within the social enterprise and not- for-profit space- encouraging us to use our imaginations in organisations helping people and planet in a variety of ways.
This acknowledgement of the power of the imagination to drive innovation is a perspective shared by John Elkington. His book The Zeronaughts has further challenged my thinking on the importance of the imagination and its ability to drive innovation.
For Elkington ‘[t]he Zeronaughts are a new breed of innovator, determined to drive problems such as carbon, waste, toxins, and poverty to z
ero.’ He champions the Zeronaughts’ approach to challenges and business and proposes that ‘[t]ransformational, systemic change is usually driven by unreasonable people — who refuse to take the world as it is as any guide to how it might be in the future.’
The Zeronaughts are imaginative: it is the fuel that enables them to go beyond current realities and practices to visualise a new pathway forwa
rd. In doing so, they are making great strides in tackling some of the globe’s biggest challenges both socially and environmentally.
Designer Andrew Parvin is certainly visualising a new path forward. I recently attended Parvin’s ‘Design & Democracy’ discussion at the RSA and was impressed by his innovative approach to architecture and town planning. He is the co-founder of Wikihouse, an open source construction set of a house available for anyone to download, print the components with a 3D printer, and build. I had never thought flat pack could be so fascinating or housing so accessible! Parvin and his team have gone beyond the current realities of architecture, town planning and
construction to imagine an alternative that could not only solve short-term shelter crisis in post-earthquake torn areas, but propose something even more radical. He has shared the plans online for free and encourages others to adopt, tweak and develop thisblueprint and idea further. He believes this democratisation of design will help us tackle some of the greatest housing and community building challenges we face: giving the ability to build low cost housing to a wider demographic than those able to afford a house or control the arrangement of the space that it’s built in.
Elkington and Parvin have made me question whether we spend enough time trying to discover our potential, not just as individuals but as a wider society. Do we give our imaginations the space to imagine a world beyond our immediate realities?
These questions are daunting ones for me- I’m not from a design background and I have a natural preference for recording and logging the hard facts of a current situation. David Kelley of IDEO has reassured me that I can achieve meaningful creative thinking and ignite my imagination in a working environment. In his TED talk on ‘Creative Confidence’, he urges his audience to join him in his ‘quest to not let the world be divided by creatives and non- creatives he urges people {to} realise that they are naturally creative and that those natural people should let their ideas fly.’
Influenced by these thoughts, I’ve come up with three questions that I now check my work against:
- Have I put myself in the shoes of the people the organisation wants to help?
- Have I thought about the realities of the social issue and situation?
- Have I challenged myself to think beyond the reality and dared to create a considered alternative future for the situation or project I am working on?
I think Parvin’s reference to democracy and design is an interesting one. I will continue to collect and consult data and read reports around an issue; there’s no contesting that this is valuable. But for me, imagination is just as- if not more- important as it enables us to go beyond ourselves and the current situation. I agree with Elkington’s emphasis on imagination as a vehicle for innovation and Rowling’s argument that it enables us to empathise. These traits make imagination a powerful tool to pick up and apply to the social issues we face locally and globally.
