[notes on designing for imagination]

I often ask myself what the role of a designer is these days. A page in my sketchbook emerged weeks ago that I can't shake. Here, unedited: 


A DESIGN MANIFESTO for IMAGINATION:


How to make, as a designer,
The gnarled forests or jungles of our imaginations + childhoods
the irregularities of a place that elevate it from the profane and the mundane
The imperfect, the unexpected
The mysterious
places of illusion and imagination that we all yearn to one day return to?
Places of fog and unclear edges that we go to in our darkest moments to clear us
of vanity and doubt.


How to design
not for the masses with predictable yearnings or predictable desires
but for the imaginations of the greatest dreamers?


Not systematically or rationally,
--leave that to engineers, financiers, economists, and strategists--
but to design whimsically and with passion
to illuminate the ideal inspirations of our dreams, our dreamers
and thus raise the expectations
of perhaps a few,
hopefully the masses
for a life even just a little less mundane
less hectic
with more laughter
more gratitude
more soul.




A few landscapes of my imagination:

What are your landscapes of imagination? Where do you go in your imagination, and can it ever be re-created? Is it real?