The future isn’t written.

We are all co-creating it every day.

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Imagination is an essential human capacity.

 

What we can imagine determines our sense of what is possible—and shapes what we do today.

 

This is why the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego works to:

 

  • Understand imagination

  • Enhance imagination

  • Encourage imagination

  • Remove limits from imagination

 

We can let the future happen to us. Or we can shape a regenerative and equitable future for all people and the planet through imagination for the good of all—together.

“The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”

Why It Matters

Every innovation, revolution, paradigm shift, and step in social progress was imagined before it was enacted.

We are facing major crises across nearly every area of contemporary life:

 

 

Existing strategies for solving problems are not enough.

 

We need to better leverage the capacity of imagination.

 

And we need to do it now.

 

Our research focuses on four key pillars:

Imagination White

Creating an Atlas of Imagination to explore the neurodiversity of imagination—in the brain, in our lives, and in society. Learn more…

Tools White

Developing learning practices and technological tools that spark imagination and leverage its power. Learn more..

Spec Futures White

Fostering the ability to imagine alternate probable, possible, and preferable futures as a key 21st competency. Learn more…

To Stars White

Looking to space and the cosmos to re-imagine our place in the universe, from astrophysics to research on the International Space Station. Learn more…

Our Guiding Principles:

1) Imagination is an essential mental faculty that can be cultivated and is the seed of nearly all great innovations and social advances.

 

2) The neurodiversity of imagination should be embraced as a strength

 

3) Human progress and social justice rely on the ability to imagine, envision, and enact diverse, alternate, sustainable futures

 

4) Technological tools for boosting imagination are being discovered, with profound potential therapeutic and learning benefit

Practitioners of the emergent field of Speculative Futures Studies use speculative forms – including, but not limited to, art, literature, and theory- to confront the legacies of imperialism, colonialism, and racism in order to imagine and enact more sustainable and just futures.

Science explains it, but
art may be the key to finding it.

The Speculative Futures Collective seeks to cultivate research with faculty, graduate students, and community members using speculative cultural forms and theories to collaborate on the future of education, ecology, gender, sexuality, and race.

Practitioners of the emergent field of Speculative Futures Studies use speculative forms – including, but not limited to, art, literature, and theory- to confront the legacies of imperialism, colonialism, and racism in order to imagine and enact more sustainable and just futures.

Science explains it, but
art may be the key to finding it.

The Speculative Futures Collective seeks to cultivate research with faculty, graduate students, and community members using speculative cultural forms and theories to collaborate on the future of education, ecology, gender, sexuality, and race.

Unlike intelligence, memory, and creativity, there is an alarming lack of coherent theory and a thin empirical literature on imagination. Why alarming? Imagination may be one of the most important keys to human flourishing and human progress, with spiritual and evolutionary adaptive benefit.

The science of imagination needs a guide for the future.

The Atlas of Imagination is the guide, focusing coherent theoretical models of imagination to drive further investigation and the tools needed for the empirical study of the neurodiversity of imagination. 

Unlike intelligence, memory, and creativity, there is an alarming lack of coherent theory and a thin empirical literature on imagination. Why alarming? Imagination may be one of the most important keys to human flourishing and human progress, with spiritual and evolutionary adaptive benefit.

The science of imagination needs
a guide for the future.

The Atlas of Imagination is the guide, focusing coherent theoretical models of imagination to drive further investigation and the tools needed for the empirical study of the neurodiversity of imagination. 

The Clarke Center is a research-and-practice hub, where the best insights from the neuroscience of imagination are connected with the latest in technology and put to use to unlock the transformative power of imagination across age groups, and communities to tackle the most pressing issues facing the planet.

Imagination discovers
new possibilities within the impossible.

Imagination is at the root of empathy and compassion. Imagination gives rise to hope. We aim to unleash the power of imagination to tackle the most pressing issues facing life on Earth – to envision and build a more equitable an sustainable world.