Monika Dunin-Kozicka is a lecturer in philosophy and cognitive science at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland. Her interests include doing research on pretense, creativity, imagination, and perception—as well as occasionally seeing things in clouds.
A post by Monika Dunin-Kozicka
Imagine the School of Imagination. If you attended such a school, you would engage in various imagination exercises and assignments every day—so that your imaginative skills could be enhanced. Among the daily exercises (performed on a regular basis) would be one called the Prompt: if a student spotted particular objects anywhere in the school—such as a purple chair, a pompom, a standalone door handle, and so on—they would be required to perform specific imaginings assigned to these objects. For example, upon suddenly noticing a pompom, one would have to stop and focus on imagining it growing larger and larger, until it ultimately (imaginatively) touches the very student performing the exercise. But beyond such prompts, which would be randomly distributed and regularly rearranged throughout the school, there would be many other objects and tools designed to support the imaginative growth of the students. The School of Imagination would be specifically designed to enable a wide range of imaginative actions.
Putting aside the fact that the School of Imagination exists (at least for now) only in imagination, the idea of designing objects and environments so that they enable imaginative actions may itself be considered a rather intriguing phenomenon. Typically, things are designed to enable specific bodily actions: chairs are designed to be sat on, bottles to be grasped and drunk from, and door handles to be grabbed and pulled. In his influential book The Design of Everyday Things (1990), Don Norman draws on the Gibsonian concept of affordances to show how objects can be designed to support particular bodily actions. For example, he offers guidance on designing doors and door handles so that they clearly afford either pushing or pulling. (Doors that must be pushed to open but instead invite pulling on their handles are poorly designed, since their affordances are not transparent to users.) Norman-inspired, bodily action-oriented design quickly became paradigmatic and is now widely taught in design schools and actively discussed in design research circles.
What I have recently become interested in are the prospects of imagination-oriented design: how can we design things so that they trigger or afford imaginative actions to those who perceive them? (Dunin-Kozicka, 2025; see also McClelland & Dunin-Kozicka, 2024). Taking into account the School of Imagination thought experiment, one compelling answer is that we can intentionally devise certain objects to prompt particular imaginings in their perceivers—just as a pompom might be intended to elicit imagination in a specific way. In fact, children’s pretend play with props, as well as certain instances of art, can be understood as operating in this way (Walton, 1990). Intentionally devising objects to be imagine-x-able appears to be a relatively accessible design strategy—one that could, in principle, be more widely adopted.
But let us now consider a different approach to imagination-oriented design—one I will call the parametrical approach, as it focuses on the specific material parameters of designed objects. Just as, in designing objects to enable particular bodily actions, we ensure that their physical features contribute to enabling those actions, so too, in designing things to trigger imagination, we must attend to their imagination-enabling parameters. At first glance, this may seem like a daunting task. After all, hypothetically, anything in the world might enable any imagining, regardless of its parameters (and imagination is often treated as fundamentally world-insensitive; Kind, 2018). Nevertheless, taking this risk, I will argue that, practically and parameter-wise, certain things are better suited than others to serve as imaginative prompts.
What, then, are the kinds of things that are likely to trigger imagining? Let us approach this question by first exposing what we usually mean by “imagination.” If imagination is, broadly speaking, the representation of the non-actual (Liao & Gendler, 2020), then objects that trigger imagination would have to prompt representations of what is non-actual. Thus, it seems to me that objects we experience as somehow not yet fully “actualized” may serve particularly well as imaginative prompts: in perceiving them, we may be inclined to engage in mental acts of their actualization. Let me illustrate this idea by considering several types of such objects.
One such type would be mutable objects—objects that can be altered in multiple ways: shaped and reshaped, recombined with other objects, rotated, or relocated. Mutable objects can be continuously transformed, as they do not possess a single, fixed form of actualization. Examples include block-based objects—such as wooden children’s blocks or LEGO bricks—as well as materials like clay, dough, or plasticine. Perceiving such objects may prompt imagination, since we can envisage their as-yet unrealized forms and later possibly manipulate them so that they take on those imagined configurations. (Michelangelo is often said to have visualized a figure within a block of material before beginning to carve it.) Moreover, while physically altering mutable things—for example, while constructing a figure from Lego bricks or damp sand—the maker may be continually prompted to imagine forthcoming forms, actualizing them first in imagination before realizing them through bodily action.
Another type of object that may trigger imagination is a fillable object: an object that presents itself to us in experientially incomplete forms and thus prompts us to “fill in” what is missing by means of imagination. A simple example would be a two- or three-dimensional figure with perceived gaps—such as an unfinished circle that we may complete imaginatively. According to some authors, in so-called amodal perception—where parts of objects are occluded by others (for example, when parts of a cat are hidden behind fence pickets)—we represent the occluded parts through mental imagery (Nanay, 2010). But beyond such cases, we can identify many other situations in which objects provoke imagination precisely by being experientially fillable. For instance, we may visually imagine what is hidden inside a gift box whose interior we cannot see, what someone is saying when we can see their mouth but cannot hear their voice, or how a perceived flower bud will eventually bloom. It seems that there are extensive possibilities for designing objects of this kind.
Yet another kind of object that may readily trigger imagination is a multistable object—that is, an object that presents itself in a perceptually ambiguous way, thereby enabling multiple interpretations. Consider clouds, ink stains, or even coffee stains. We may perceive them simply as clouds or stains, but we may also discern various entities in them: animals, faces, symbols, and so on. As Richard Gregory (2000) suggests, we can in effect “reverse the Rorschach test” and ask which kinds of visual patterns are especially conducive to perception and ideation:
I suggest that reversing the test—from kinds of people to kinds of patterns—might show what stimulates creativity. This is a clear experimental question: which kinds of pattern evoke the richest variety of perceptions and ideas? (...) For a start, one may think of realistic pictures as representing external objects, whereas ink blots and abstract paintings evoke internal creations. Which patterns or pictures are most evocative should tell us what switches us on most powerfully to create new perceptions and ideas. (Gregory, 2000, p. 19).
Even though there is ongoing debate about whether such seeing-in experiences are perceptual in nature (e.g., Wollheim, 1998) or imaginative (e.g., Sartre, 1940/2010), I would argue that, whether perceptual or imaginative, alternatively interpreting multistable stimuli requires us to adopt a general ”imaginative stance” toward them. That is, we must recognize that such stimuli can be interpreted or reinterpreted in multiple ways, and that there is no single, definitive form of their experiential actualization. Accordingly, I would treat multistable objects as likely to recruit our imagination, at least in this general sense.
However, Imagination-Oriented Design (IOD) would not be limited to creating objects that are merely mutable, fillable, or multistable—or to designing environments populated by such objects (schools of imagination included). We can likely identify further, more specific types of objects that may prompt imagination: bizarre objects, enigmatic objects, and others. Moreover, as suggested earlier, IOD would not be confined to this “parametrical” approach to design; it would also encompass the intentional devising of objects that enable different imaginative actions. More generally, IOD shows up to emphasize the role that material objects can play in our imaginative engagement with the world, rather than focusing solely on the internal capacities of the imaginer. It represents a design step oriented toward making our world more imagination-sensitive. Is it a viable step?
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Acknowledgments
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Tom McClelland, who introduced me to the topic of affording imagination, invited me to collaborate with him on it, and thereby prompted me to think further about how objects may elicit imagination. Thank you!
References
Dunin-Kozicka, M. (2025). Imagination-Oriented Design: Why and How to Create Objects and Environments with Imaginative Affordances? In P. Fortuna & A. Dutkowska (Eds.), The Creators of Tomorrow. An Interdisciplinary Perspective on Shaping the Future (pp. 95-116). Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004748194
Kind, A. (2018). How Imagination Gives Rise to Knowledge. In F. Macpherson & F. Dorsch (Eds.), Perceptual imagination and perceptual memory (pp. 227-246). Oxford University Press.
Liao, S.-Y., & Gendler, T. (2020). Imagination. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/imagination/
McClelland, T., & Dunin-Kozicka, M. (2024). Affording Imagination. Philosophical Psychology, 37(7), 1615-1638; https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2024.2354433
Nanay, B. (2010). Perception and imagination: Amodal perception as mental imagery. Philosophical studies, 150(2), 239-254; https://www.jstor.org/stable/40856553
Norman, D. A. (1990). The design of everyday things. Doubleday.
Sartre, J. P. (2010). The imaginary: A phenomenological psychology of the imagination. Routledge.
Walton, K. L. (1990). Mimesis as make-believe: On the foundations of the representational arts. Harvard University Press.
Wollheim, R. (1998). On pictorial representation. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 56(3), 217–226. https://doi.org/10.2307/432361