Geoff Mulgan, social and public imagination (Was : NESTA prototyping social forms)

Dear PSF Folks,

And to follow on the NESTA link, here’s a draft article relevant to prototyping social forms:
The Imaginary Crisis (and how we might quicken social and public imagination)
Geoff Mulgan, April 2020,
UCL, Demos Helsinki and Untitled

Geoff’s background:
I am writing this now as Professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy and So- cial Innovation at UCL’s STEaPP, and as a fellow at Demos Helsinki. Before that I was CEO of Nesta (2011-19), CEO of the Young Foundation (2004-11), and director of the UK Government Strategy Unit 2000-2004. I have had quite an active involvement in social imagination over the years, including the creation of many new organisations and policy approaches; running teams working on the practical side of social design and strategy; writings (eg on utopias in The Locust and the Bee, and on futures work in The Art of Public Strategy); commissions, including Nesta reports on participatory futures, and several surveys of futures practice globally over the last 20 years. I have also been involved in some large-scale futures exercises for whole nations, such as Australia 2020. I’ll leave to others to judge whether that makes me well qualified to comment, or too trapped by the assumptions of the recent past.

Xin Wei

Begin forwarded message:

Dear PSF folks, 

I met Geoff Mulgan @ NESTA (UK) at a  UNESCO event modestly titled “Learning Planet”.
Mulgan has done 20 years of prototyping social forms.  It’d be interesting to compare:

NESTA
:
We bring bold ideas to life to change the world for good.

Nesta is an innovation foundation. For us, innovation means turning bold ideas into reality. It also means changing lives for the better. This is what keeps us awake at night and gets us out of bed in the morning.

https://www.nesta.org.uk/toolkit/prototyping-framework/

Prototyping is an approach to developing, testing and improving an idea at an early stage before you commit a lot of resources to it.

It is a way of working that allows you to experiment with an idea so you can learn and refine it into something even better.

The prototyping process outlined in this toolkit was developed by Nesta and thinkpublic. Depending on what you are prototyping you may find stages of this process are more relevant than others, but the diagram provides a framework which will allow you structure your approach.

XinWei