Imagination as strategic design energy
Imagination is not the opposite of method. It is what method looks like when applied to the future rather than the past.
Most design tools are analytical — they help you understand what exists.
Market research, user interviews, competitive analysis, behavioral data.
These are necessary. They tell you what is. They cannot tell you what could be.
Imagination tells you what could be. Not as a wish — as a specific, inhabitable proposition. As a scene that can be evaluated. As a question made concrete.
We use imagination as empathic projection: the capacity to inhabit a situation that doesn't yet exist and feel its texture from inside.
To ask whether what it contains is worth having. To notice whether it understands something true about the person inside it.
This is not a personality trait. It is a discipline — practiced, tested against reality, refined through the specific rather than elaborated through the general.
The most advanced design method we have. Not because it is the most sophisticated. Because it works in the space before the solution has been named — which is the only space where genuinely new things become possible.