So You Don't Think You Have an Imagination?

In two weeks' time, we are kicking off a two-week creative challenge on The Maker's Space all around imagination. During the challenge, participants will all be forced through totally silly daily exercises designed to make them think outside the box, to show them how structured imagination can be and (we hope!) to transform the way they think. Each day they'll share their responses to a prompt on a communal message board and, by having one another there for support, encouragement and to laugh at the wonderfully ridiculous things that are doing to come out, we think it could be genuinely transformative. In fact, I think it’s one of the most serious things we are doing to date.

It isn't easy to be silly and it certainly isn't easy to be silly in front of a group of strangers. Most of us spend our lives trying to seem competent, sensible and in control of ourselves. Yet so much of imagination requires exactly the opposite. We have to be able to follow strange thoughts, to entertain ridiculous ideas and to not worry about whether what we are saying makes any sense. We have to open ourselves up to embarrassment, or to be judged. We have to be willing to be weird.

Before I explain why we've built an entire challenge around imagination, and why I think it matters far more than almost anything else we have done, if you would like to join the challenge you'll need to become a Makers Space member before the 20th July. At the end of the article we will explain how to sign up.

Nearly eighteen months ago now, Meg and I were discussing imagination and I said I didn’t think I was a particularly imaginative person. I wished I was, but I wasn't or had never been. She immediately challenged me saying how could I possibly say that when I spend my life creating designs? Surely that requires imagination?

At the time I wasn't entirely convinced. Looking back, I think what I had actually done was confuse imagination with storytelling. When I pictured someone imaginative, I imagined somebody who could sit down and invent entire worlds. Somebody who could tell stories off the top of their head about dragons and pirates and kingdoms in the clouds. Somebody who could effortlessly answer a question about where the stars come from and somehow end up on a twenty-minute adventure involving giants and flying whales.

That has never really been me – I have always been a bit too serious.

But the more I've thought about it, the more I've realised that perhaps my definition of imagination was far too narrow.

Much like I am forever telling people that drawing and creativity are not the same thing, I think I had fallen into the trap of believing imagination and storytelling were the same thing. They overlap, of course they do, but they aren't identical. A designer working on a new collection is using imagination. An inventor coming up with a solution to a problem is using imagination. Somebody replanting their garden and picturing what it might look like in six months' time is using imagination.

Imagination isn't just about creating fantasy worlds. It's about being able to see possibilities and outcomes that haven’t happened yet.

Children rarely struggle with imagination. Give a child a cardboard box and they don't ask what it is supposed to be - they decide what it is. It might be a castle, a spaceship, a racing car or a cave. The answer can change three times within ten minutes and nobody cares.

The same thing happens with drawing. Young children don't sit down worrying whether they're good at drawing – they just draw because they have an idea they want to get onto paper and it’s fun. It is only later that comparison creeps in. Suddenly somebody else's horse looks more realistic, or somebody else's tree looks better, or somebody else's picture receives more praise, and drawing stops being fun. It’s just another thing to succeed or fail at. I think imagination follows a very similar path.

There is an age where pretending starts to feel childish and imaginary games become embarrassing. The bedroom that once became a forest is simply a bedroom again. The cushions stop being stepping stones across a jungle river and return to being cushions. The little stories we used to tell ourselves about the world slowly disappear, not because anybody explicitly tells us to stop imagining, but because we learn that there are correct answers and sensible answers. I think I was about 9 when my imaginary dog Trigger died. There is a point when we become increasingly interested in facts, and, before we know it, all that imagination has quietly disappeared from our lives without us really noticing.

Of course some of that is inevitable and probably healthy. There are plenty of advantages to understanding how the world actually works – I would have done a lot worse in my GCSE’s if I hadn’t learnt the planets rotated around the sun and instead thought there was a giant with a fishing rod up in the sky moving us all round.

So I am not advocating for living entirely in fantasy. But I do wonder whether, in becoming more sensible, many of us become less curious. When we stop asking questions that don't have answers, or we stop following strange thoughts that lead nowhere, doesn’t that make the whole world shrink a bit? When you can create whole stories just with your head, isn’t that a more enjoyable place to be?

Imagination has never been something I've spent a great deal of time thinking about. I have never had a problem with my creativity, so I just always felt like I can design and make and that’s enough. I don’t need a wild imagination too.

But then Sasha arrived and it changed that for me.

She is only 11 months old, so whilst we may not be telling stories or going on adventures just yet, I can already see the wonder in her eyes. When she spots a plane in the sky or when a bird lands on the railing next to us, or when it’s raining outside the window. She doesn’t understand any of it so all of it is like magic.

Seeing the first little glimpses of wonder had made me think about the kind of parent I want to be. I want to be able to walk through a park and wonder aloud where the bumble bee is hurrying home to. I want us to speculate about who lives in the little hole beneath the tree roots. I want to tell stories about the giants who live above the clouds, where the shadows disappear to when the sun comes out and what exactly it is that birds spend all day talking about.

It’s not because I think children need those sorts of stories in order to have a happy childhood. It’s more that I want to be able to look at the world in a way which feels magical, for me and for Sasha. I want to turn an ordinary walk into an adventure regardless of whether I am with Sasha or not.

I have spent the last few years working hard, worrying lots, feeling productive and maybe taking everything a bit too seriously. And I don’t want to do more of that – instead I want to live in my head a little bit more and Sasha is just a good excuse for that.

I want to be sillier; I want to see the wonder in the world, and in the process, I think it will help my work. It will help me to break free from any aspect that still makes me be normal, or conform, and it will allow my designs to fly off into some uncharted territory that I am far too sensible to get to right now. So this is a very self-interest project.

Whilst I could just keep this a personal project to make myself a better storyteller, I actually think there are a lot of people who might feel like me. Adulthood has a way of squeezing the imagination out of us. We have too much else to concern ourselves with, too many actual worries, too little time, and too many things more important. We don’t prioritise having fun. Sasha’s day probably includes about 5 hours of playtime. I am lucky if I get 5 minutes.

The issue is, the more serious we are, the more likely we are to repeat the same ideas, follow the same paths and arrive at the same conclusions. Imagination makes us loosen our grip on reality for a minute. Children can pretend to be pirates without a second thought but if you ask a room full of grown-ups to spend five minutes inventing a backstory for a pigeon, suddenly everyone becomes deeply worried about looking foolish.

Imagination, creativity, invention – all these wonderful things live on the other side of discomfort. All of them come with the risk of not getting an outcome we thought we would. More than just helping our creativity though, imagination also helps us to see the lightness in the world. Sometimes it would be nice to go for a walk with a friend and instead of talking about the state of the world, or the challenges we are working through, to each find our favourite leaf and explain to the other why we love it. Maybe I would actually learn more about them in the process.

I think that is the part that interests me most. Not just becoming more creative or expanding my work, although I am sure that will happen too, but becoming more playful. Being willing to ask silly questions, entertain ridiculous possibilities and notice things that would otherwise pass us by. The world can be quite heavy at times and there is no shortage of serious things demanding our attention. Imagination doesn't solve any of those problems, but it does make life feel a little bigger. A little stranger. A little more enjoyable.

Perhaps that sounds frivolous, but I don't think it is. If we can find more opportunities for wonder, curiosity and playfulness in our everyday lives, then surely that is worthwhile. After all, we only get one go at this and it seems a shame to spend the whole thing being sensible.

The good news is that imagination isn't some magical gift handed out to a lucky few. Like creativity, it is far more structured and practical than we often realise. Many artists, writers and musicians have developed systems specifically designed to help them generate unexpected ideas. They don't simply wait for inspiration to arrive, they have processes that encourage it.

The composer John Cage famously used the I Ching to introduce chance into his work. David Bowie used a cut-up technique, physically rearranging words and phrases to discover surprising connections and using those as the basis for lyrics. Jazz musicians spend years learning scales, structures and musical patterns, then use those building blocks to improvise in the moment.

From the outside, it can look effortless, but actually what we are seeing is the result of years of practice. They have developed tools, collected methods and built habits that allow them to move beyond the first obvious idea and think left field.

Great storytellers do this too - they build up a cast of characters, recurring themes, familiar settings and narrative tricks that they can return to whenever they need them. Over time these become so deeply ingrained that the process starts to feel instinctive.

For years now I have been teaching people how to build creative confidence. I have seen how it grows from taking risks, repeating method and having a process you can trust. The same is true of imagination. You have to start small – invent a new fruit by combining the features of three other ones together. Then you expand – and with regular exercise, your invention will get stronger and the processes will start to feel natural.

Which is exactly why have built this challenge. It’s not because everyone wants to be able to tell stories – not everyone has a Sasha! – but it's because we think everyone would benefit from exercising their imagination.

For two weeks, we'll be setting a short daily imagination exercise inside The Maker's Space. Most of them should only take ten or fifteen minutes and none of them require any particular talent. You don't need to be able to write. You don't need to be able to draw. You don't need to think of yourself as imaginative.

In fact, if you're reading this article because you don't think you have much imagination at all, you're exactly the sort of person I had in mind when we designed it.

The exercises start off very simply. You'll be asked to come up with unusual uses for ordinary objects, invent personalities for animals, create impossible inventions, dream up strange worlds and answer ridiculous "what if?" questions. As the challenge progresses, you'll begin building characters, stories, places and ideas from combinations you would never normally put together.

The important thing is that there are no good answers.

This isn't school – nobody is going to be marking your work and saying whether you did a good job or not. All we are trying to do is help you bypass the sensible voice in your head that keeps telling you to be realistic. Whilst that voice is useful for many things, imagination isn't one of them.

Along the way, everyone will share their responses on the community board which I think will end up being one of the most valuable parts of the challenge. Not because you'll see brilliant pieces of writing or astonishing feats of imagination, but because you'll see dozens of people approaching exactly the same prompt in completely different ways.

One person will create a melancholy pigeon who dreams of becoming an opera singer. Another will invent a bookshelf that doubles as a bus stop. Someone else will produce something so wonderfully bizarre that none of us can quite work out how they arrived there. And that's the point.

The challenge isn't really about the individual exercises. It's about building the habit of following strange thoughts instead of dismissing them. It's about becoming more comfortable with uncertainty, silliness and play. It's about reminding ourselves that creativity doesn't always come from concentrating harder. Sometimes it comes from letting go.

My hope is that by the end of the two weeks you'll find it easier to generate ideas, easier to think differently and easier to approach creative projects without immediately worrying whether you're doing them correctly. But even if none of that happens, and all you get is two weeks of laughter, some wonderfully odd conversations and a renewed sense of curiosity about the world, I would still consider that a success.

If you want to sign up, you’ll need to become a member of The Maker’s Space by the 20th July. In addition to this you can get access to loads of other benefits which are all explained on this page.