AlAskAn Miner PAnning for gold, 1916 (librAry of Congress)

for the last year fifty-seven students have been working on the MA Applied imagination in the Creative industries here at Central st. Martins.

The title alone has caused some controversy, the ‘Applied imagination’ part in particular. Critics sense something of the new-age about it, surmising it to lack definition or formality. others find ‘Applied imagination’ a seductive title, feeling that there are few better ways to encapsulate the gamut of what ‘creative’ people do; an advance on ‘applied arts’ and as such worthy of consideration.

The critics are predictably less opposed to the ‘Creative industries’ bit, but for many of us it is their component parts that lack definition. Anyone making a serious attempt to map the territories of the creative industries must prepare for adventures in the worlds of business, logistics, technology, buying and education as much as design and advertising, and the formidable tangle of lanes and byways that link them.

Correspondingly most of us refer to the course as simply Applied imagination: a pioneering course that is nurturing a broader – and better – definition of what imagination is, and what the ‘creative industries’ actu-ally do, ready for the next half of the century.

so how is the course structured? That is, what do we actually do? Whenever i’m asked this i admit that i have to think hard every time. Most people have a pretty good understanding of what might be expected of a person studying, for example, theatre design, fashion, jewelry, performance art or graphics. but what hap-pens if, as is increasingly the case today, what you want to do as a ‘creative’ doesn’t neatly fit into any of these categories? What if you want to revolutionise the design of and access to the public spaces currently controlled by heavy-handed governments? or you want to fertilise better relationships between retailers and customers to both their advantages? or you want to change the static look-but-don’t-touch formula of the photographic gallery? What course would you do then?

The answer is: this course. All of the above are real projects being developed by

the students on Ai 2012. naturally, no course can possibly provide all the necessary tutors to cater for such varie-ties of project, so a very significant part of Ai is not only to seek out experts in our fields of interest for ourselves, but to use them to manifest our plans in the real world – hence, ‘applied’.

in consequence much of what has to happen to complete such projects isn’t considered ‘creative’ at all under casual definition, and many Ai students are suspi-

cious of the term’s use despite its place in the course title. in fact many will spend very little time doing anything considered ‘creative’ at all. before they make anything they will be interviewing experts, audiences, users; they will be researching and re-defining their thoughts and ideas; they will be travelling and training; they will be recording, testing, evidencing, iterating, analysing. They will be thinking and reflecting and intuiting. dead ends are marked and illumination is discovered, not delivered.

As any professional creative practitioner knows from experience, all this is the real business of creativity. Perhaps we might be better off, then, thinking of crea-tivity not merely as a characteristic of a product, but as the successful synthesis of an original thought. Thus the process becomes clearer: the ability to gather, select and parse data (input); to mentally transform it into what is not yet apparent (imagination); to manifest it according-ly (creativity); and finally to introduce it to the real world (application) where, to the viewer, it once again becomes input, both completing and engendering a helpful cycle of progression.

This formula can be applied to just about any discov-ery of significance, from Mendeleev’s periodic table, to economic development, to cryptographical algorithms, to experimental poetry, to weaponry, to disneyland – even the gold panner on the front of this leaflet, who has become something of a course mascot with his sense of adventure and his perfectly synthesised, home-made gold-finding artefact.

The syntheses you see here, then, are the products of our 57 imaginations, applied: the imaginations of someone applied to a creative vector, and applied to you. you may find yourself, as we have, occasionally lost or bewildered as you navigate the ideas on show and engage in the many discourses. The products are not always art or design objects under the traditional defini-tion, and thus may require considerable interaction to fully absorb what is being communicated. you are as likely to see a live reading, a series of email exchanges, a classification system or a plate of food as much as a photograph, a painting or a film.

Whichever artefacts you choose to interact with, your responses are a final and important part of these discrete occupations, as you decide how they might apply to your world, and to you.

Words: niCholAs of hiTChinWWW.APPliediMAginATion2012.CoM

Creativity is not Merely a CharaCteristiC of a produCt, but the

suCCessful synthesis of an original thought

What is applied imagination?