This month my understanding of imagination has been challenged and made me reflect on my past work. Are we investing in ways that sustain its impact or just creating moments? Find out more below.
Welcome to June’s edition of the GeoSkinner newsletter, just in time! It is marking season and the volume of concentrated reading is something my ADHD brain struggles with. Forcing myself to focus, along with the emotional drain and worrying about being unfair to students, has triggered a couple of migraines. But hey, I got here in the end.
Geoscience Differently: Are we building imagination that lasts?
Regular readers of my newsletter will appreciate that imagination, and its importance to science, is a common theme. We need well-developed imaginations so we can envisage problems, identify solutions, and collectively find alternative futures that give us the hope that they can become reality.
My interest in, and research on, imagination has been inspired and shaped by my former mentor and all-round science hero, Professor Hannah Cloke OBE. Hannah has been talking about how crucial imagination is to disaster communications for years and recently gave a brilliant keynote The Climate Futures We Dare to Imagine – click the link to watch it on YouTube or read her related thoughts in this article for The Conversation.
In both, Hannah introduces the concept of imagination infrastructure to a flood management context as “the building blocks of society’s shared understanding”. She goes on to describe how a flood warning or a photograph of a flooded street can act as imagination infrastructure.
Last summer, I was equally inspired by the Interrogating Imagination Infrastructure report from Joseph Rowntree Foundation. I used the ideas from the report to help develop my ‘Play your Research’ workshops, encouraging early career scientists to think of their work as imagination infrastructure. The report describes how the idea emerged to help frame the resources that help communities collectively visualise alternative futures. It also describes how the rapid growth in research using imagination infrastructure has led to the use of many different terms, frames, and directions.
On the one hand, imagination infrastructure is used to describe anything that provides support to people’s imaginations – a warning, a story, a photo, for example. Here, the structural element is applied cognitively. Through showing someone a photo of a familiar yet flooded street, you provide them the cognitive structure to visualise what this might be like on their own street. Thus, the photograph becomes the imagination infrastructure.
However, Interrogating Imagination Infrastructure implores us to think “infrastructurally” about imagination, where infrastructures: are created by and support social practice; can be ‘hard’ (e.g., roads) or ‘soft’ (e.g., movement of information); are shaped by regulations and standards; and, require maintenance. In this understanding, imagination infrastructures are something more than cognitive structures, they are the way they are created.
I find thinking infrastructurally about imagination a useful idea. It calls on us to be deliberate in investment, to continuously support and maintain, and to pay attention to who, and who does not have access. It tells us that building true imagination infrastructure isn’t just building moments, it’s building something that lasts.
Considering this led me to a distinction that I found useful – where the infrastructure exists to build and, importantly, sustain imagination over the long-term, individual resources should instead be considered as imagination engines:
- The flood warning is an engine – the processes and models that produce and distribute it is the infrastructure.
- The photo of the flooded street is an engine – the means of capturing, collating, and disseminating such images is the infrastructure.
This distinction might seem arbitrary1, but it provides a useful reflection on practice and its usefulness. My own past work has involved creating lots of imagination engines, for example the Flash Flood! VR experience2.
As an activity, Flash Flood! helped people visualise what a flood might look like in a virtual river valley and it made people more interested in learning about flooding – it was an imagination engine. However, it was not supported by imagination infrastructure and that limited its impact. The experience itself has not been used for years and it is likely obsolete for newer VR headsets. To have got the most out of the project, I would need to have put more effort into the infrastructure surrounding it – on reflection, this is what my Earth Arcade project could have been.
This does not mean that imagination engines have no value or are inferior to imagination infrastructure. In fact, they are both vital. The engine is the motor that gets the imagination running, the infrastructure is the open road that sets it free.
I’d love to know:
Are you building imagination engines or infrastructure in your work? Or, do you think the distinction is not helpful? Let me know in the comments below.
1Interrogating Imagination Infrastructure itself warns that the term could become problematic if not applied metaphorically.
2Incidentally, only possible thanks to Hannah’s support, encouragement, and funding via the NERC-FFIR programme.
Imagination Engines: Dangers & Dwellers
Dangers & Dwellers is a group roleplaying card game created by Games for Geoscience regulars Emanuelle Intrieri, Samuele Segoni, and Francesco Cardi from the University of Florence (L’Università di Firenze). The action takes place on a fictional island that faces many hazards, including floods, hurricanes, and earthquakes, and players (or teams) assume roles in the island’s governance and take actions to manage the risks. You win if you reach the end of Turn 6 with your island’s happiness, wealth, and population all above 0.
I was sent a print & play version of the game and after a long evening of printing, cutting, and laminating, I played the game with my 2nd-year Environmental Hazards students. In the first attempt, still figuring out how to play, we were out of the game by turn 3, but on our second go we were equipped with better strategies and only lost on the final, big, Level III hazard.
The game was fun to play and benefitted from multiple attempts. It demonstrates the balance of hazard likelihood and impact, different priorities across different groups, and the cumulative impacts of multiple hazards well in a ‘show, don’t tell manner’. Unfortunately, with only two hours I did not get a chance to run a debrief with the students but this was a very enjoyable way to finish the module for the year.
Do you know a geoscience-themed game I should play?
Resources: New Videos on GeoSkinner 360
I have uploaded six new videos to the GeoSkinner 360 channel. This channel is dedicated to only 360 videos, where you change the viewing angle within the video. The six videos were all filmed whilst I was in Edinburgh with our 2-year students and cover several sites that we visited or they used for their projects. Below is a preview of a flood tour I took down the Water of Leith – to get the most of the video, view it using the YouTube App on a mobile device with the highest resolution you can make work.
These videos are part of the imagination infrastructure for my teaching. Students need to design research projects in these sites having never visited them and these videos form just one of the resources available to them to imagine what that would look like.
About this Newsletter
GeoSkinner’s (mostly) monthly newsletter is for geoscientist students, researchers, educators, and communicators wanting to do things more imaginatively.
With each newsletter, you will find:
- Geoscience Differently: A big idea about doing geoscience differently
- Imagination Engines: Examples of inspiring and creative work by others
- Behind-the-scenes updates from my projects and signposting to useful resources
If you’re interested in geoscience, games, and creativity, you’re in the right place – subscribe below to get the newsletter sent directly to your inbox.
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