Imaginative North Workshop
Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Arts (LICA), Lancaster University
21 November 2013
Imagining Radical Research
Imaginative North was the fourth of the workshops comprising the New Thinking from the North project's pilot phase. It was organised by colleagues at Lancaster University and hosted at Imagination within the Lancaster Institute of Contemporary Arts.
Imagination was selected as a key theme for this project in order to facilitate exploration of the role imaginative creativity has had and continues to have in the development of cultural, economic and community life in the North of England. The initial stimulus for this workshop was Albert Einstein’s claim: ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge.’
Key Questions Addressed at the Workshop
- How can imagination make conceptual leaps that ‘knowledge’ may not?
- How has the imagination of ‘urban improvement’ through heritage effected social and cultural development in the North, as we imagine new designs for cities?
- How can we cultivate shared or collective imaginaries which account for the needs of ageing populations, or of disaffected young people?
- How can we channel creativity and innovation at the boundaries of our imagination to develop our ideas and research?
To consider these questions we began to collect and develop some of the ideas generated from the preceding workshops, as well as considering new directions in which these themes could be taken aided by a keynote provocation from Sir Christopher Frayling.
