Feeling Our Way Forward: Affect, Imaginative Agency, and Design in Future-Making

This paper outlines the understanding of imaginative agency – the confidence, capacity, and creativity to imagine plural and equitable collective futures and move toward them – through examples from workshop-based participatory research. It shows how emotions play a vital role in animating imaginative agency and enabling its affective and bodily complexity. This approach counters the common neglect of feelings as world-making forces in design practice – an evasion that reproduces dominant narratives and unjust structures. The discussion is anchored in work on affect, bringing these insights together with practices of design that materialize and explore futures. More concretely, imaginative agency at work is illustrated through systems-shifting and future-oriented projects, demonstrating how participatory co-design workshops engage emotions and embodiment to create space for anticipating life otherwise. Through three themes – orienting, imagining, and locating –imaginative agency activated in practice is explored, showing how people’s emotions and embodied sensemaking bring possible futures closer.