A change to this blog? Imagine that!

Today I want to tell you about a change to my role, and to what I will be doing for the next 12 months, as well as to share what that means for this blog moving forward.  As we celebrate 10 years of Transition Network, I am fortunate to have been offered the opportunity to take a part-time sabbatical (3 days per week) in order to research and write a new book.  I’m not vanishing altogether, I will still be working a day a week for Transition Network, and will be writing for the website, although less than I do at present.

As of March 1^st I am going down to working 2 days a week for Transition Network, and from May 1^st down to one day.  The reason is that I am planning to write a book about imagination.  It struck me recently that much of what we do in Transition is about imagination, how to stimulate it, how to create places where people can come together to reimagine in order to then set about rebuilding.  To accompany the process of writing the book, I have created a new stand-alone blog, called RobHopkins.net, which is now live.  I will post things as I go along, and I really hope you will visit regularly and share thoughts, ideas and comments.

It increasingly feels to me that our collective imagination, our ability to ask “what if?” and to imagine something other than what we currently have, is a much under-used muscle at a time when we really need it at full strength.  As David Fleming put it:

And yet I look around, and I don’t see much imagining happening, indeed it looks to me to be being given less and less space in schools, universities, workplaces, families.  While there is much written about creativity, there is much less written about imagination.  I am particularly moved by this, from Ursula Le Guin:

So I want to take some time to dive deep, to take a road trip through the places in our culture (Transition being one of them) where imagination is still valued, cherished and celebrated.  I want to meet some of the people to whom we entrust our imaginations, the authors, artists and filmmakers who imagine professionally, as it were. I want to find the people who are creating the spaces in which people come together to imagine as communities, in groups.  And I want to reflect on what it might look like if we decided that we need a national crash programme of imagination rebuilding.  What would happen?  Who would do what?  How might it unfold? Because if there were ever a time in our history when we needed our imaginations fully-charged, it is now, as we face a perfect storm of challenges.

It’s a journey I’d like you to accompany me on, to tell me what you think, to share interesting things I’ve come across, to point me to things I might not have spotted before, to give me feedback as the whole thing evolves.

On the new website, to get us started, you will find there an interview I did with author and poet Michael Rosen, an interview with Scott Barry Kaufman, founder of the Imagination Institute in the US, a blog about my day at the London Toy Fair, and a few other things.  It will be added to regularly as the project evolves.  You can sign up, should you wish to, for notifications when anything is posted.

So what does this mean for this blog?  Well that rather depends on you.  Next week we’ll be announcing a call for Guest Editors/Artists-in-Residence to take over editing our blog on a monthly basis.  It’s a really exciting new departure for us, and we hope it will result in some really interesting new voices and output gracing our website over the next 12 months.

This doesn’t mean that I will disappear from Transition.  I will still be writing occasional blogs on this website, and some of what I post on the new blog will also be mirrored here.  I will also be less available via email as I try to carve out some focused space to really get immersed in the research. I will be taking on less speaking engagements on behalf of Transition Network, but can still be booked in my own personal capacity as a speaker.  Get in touch if you want to discuss anything like that.  As I say, this is a year-long change, but then I’ll be back.  I hope that my journey into the imagination, my imagination road trip, is something that you might accompany me on.  I think it’s going to be fascinating.