ICT and Imagination

At the end a recurring question remains: What good are ICTs to design education and practice? To answer that, it is necessary to focus on imagination and the production of visual images as the core activity of design. What is imagination? And can ICTs “think” imaginatively and see visions? No, they cannot. Imagination is a concept with a long and shifting course of progression through Western civilization. In ancient Athens both Plato and Aristotle regarded imagination as mimesis or imitation of nature. For neither of these philosophers does imagination directly apprehend reality – only reason, they argued, can do that. But for Aristotle, imagination is necessary to intelligent thinking because imagination links sensation to reason, even more than memory, which can only look backward in time, is capable of doing. For Aristotle, imagination is a formal representation of both sensation and reason, and it is therefore an important mental power. The Classical conceptualization of imagination as imitation or “holding a mirror up to nature” dominated the philosophy of art until the European Renaissance in the 15th and 16th centuries. Then in the Romantic Age of the late 18th and early 19th centuries a new conceptualization of imagination claimed that imagination is not so much a mirror as a light that can actually apprehend and illuminate ultimate reality. The poet’s mind, the great Romantics believed, creates images of truth and beauty and goodness. Moreover, the modern philosopher Nietzsche in the late 19th century claimed that not only does imagination create visions of reality but it actually creates reality itself.