The Imagination Sundial
A design tool to help cultivate the collective imagination towards the safe and just space of the Doughnut
vVersion 1.0 (June 2020)
Examples updated regularly
“It is precisely here, in our agency of imagination, where new possibilities arise, where we can see afresh, think differently, and create another relationship to each other and the world around us... waking us up and reconnecting to our senses” Eva Bakkeslett, Playing for Time (2015)
Overview
Can you imagine a time when we are all thriving in the safe and just space of the Doughnut? How about your neighbours, your colleagues, your local politicians...?
The Imagination Sundial is a design tool for those who wish to intentionally cultivate the collective imaginative capacity of people, organisations or nations towards the safe and just space of the Doughnut.
The Sundial has four main areas: space, place, practices and pacts, that each contain 6 elements, each with a title and short description. This tool contains a brief overview of the four main areas, some practical examples and images of the Sundial that you can download.
- Read here the blog Rob Hopkins and I wrote introducing the Imagination Sundial in June 2020
- Read here about how CoLab Dudley is using the Imagination Sundial in their work to reimagine the high street of Dudley,
Space
The mental and emotional space that expands our capacity to imagine
Space is foundational to imagination. Busy and stressful lives riddled with fear and anxiety inhibit our potential for imagining, so space is about how we can slow down, open up and connect with others and the natural world to rekindle this capacity. It’s also about how we feel welcome and safe to participate when we gather together and give ourselves permission when we’re scared of getting things ‘wrong’. Space fluctuates day by day. We can have good days and bad days. Moments where we’re more imaginative and moments where we struggle. Space is like the soil of imagination. The more we cultivate the soil, the better the imagination grows.
Practical examples:
- Activity Incubator Shops, Participatory City, Barking & Dagenham, UK
- Morning Pages, The Artist's Way, Julia Cameron
- Time Machine Exercise, Transition Network
- The Children's Fire
- Tech Shabbat
(Please share more examples you know of in the comments below to add to this list)
Place
Gathering places that provide platforms for collective imagining
What mental and emotional space is for the mind and soul of an individual, so place is for the mind and soul of a community. These are places to dwell and enjoy without having to buy or pay anything. Places designed for connection, creation, collaboration and chance encounter. Places that are welcoming and inviting to a rich diversity of people. And perhaps most importantly, the best places are those that you leave with your sense of what the future could be having changed, even by a small amount. But places like these where you don’t have to buy or pay anything have reduced in number as former public commons have been enclosed by private ownership. If we’re to rebuild the collective imagination, we need to start reclaiming and rebuilding the commons at every scale of community, from the street to central civic places and the wild natural places around us.
Practical examples:
- Reimagining the Civic Commons, US
- Civic Square, Birmingham, UK
- Public Plaza Project, Bogota, Colombia
- The Rebuild Foundation, Chicago, US
- Margaret Mahy Family Playground, Christchurch, NZ
- The Glade, Devon, UK
- École Domaine du Possible, Arles, France
- Kitty's Laundrette, Liverpool, UK
- De Kaskantine, Amsterdam, Netherlands
(Please share more examples you know of in the comments below to add to this list)
Practices
Practices that connect us and change our frame of possibility
Whilst space and place set the foundations for imagination, practices is where the magic really happens. Practices are the things we can do together that take us out of our rational thinking minds into something altogether different, breaking down our internal constraints and societal norms to open up a greater sense of what is possible. A good practice creates bridges between the real and imagined, the known and unknown, inviting us into the liminal space where things begin to shift. This can happen through play, through making and through stories. It can happen through the use of limits and through exploratory language like ‘yes, and’ and ‘what if?’. Great practices also cultivate mental and emotional space and some even create places in the process, thereby ticking all the boxes for imagination.
Practical examples:
- Role play - Future Design, Japan
- Cooking - Migrateful
- Making art - Art Angel, Dundee, UK
- Playing - Pop-Up Tomorrow, London, UK
- Celebrating - The Big Lunch, UK
- Step into the Doughnut
(Please share more examples you know of in the comments below to add to this list)
Pacts
Pacts of collaboration that catalyse imagination into action
One of the best catalysts for the imagination is action. Action instills belief, and belief inspires further action, and a great way to bring about action is with pacts. A pact is an agreement that recognises multiple actors in a place have to come together to make things work. They are the result of collaborative and cooperative relationships cultivated between public authorities and citizens, along with local business, knowledge institutions (like universities) and civil society organisations. A part of this is the role of the catalyst, the individual or organisation that performs the skillful act of inviting, convening and offering the initial vision. Everyone plays a part in the pact. And rather than compete, the strengths of each actor is combined with the others, meaning pacts have a truly transformative potential for translating the collective imagination of all actors into action.
Practical examples:
- Laboratório Para La Ciudad, Mexcio City, Mexico
- Trento, Italy
- l’Ufficio Immaginazione Civica, Bologna, Italy
- Chieri, Italy
- Ceinture Aliment-terre, Liège, France
- Intentionally designing pacts of collaboration, Dudley, UK
- 17.17 Infrastructure for collaboration, Norway
(Please share more examples you know of in the comments below to add to this list)
Acknowledgements
The design of the Imagination Sundial originated as part of my Masters dissertation at Schumacher College. Huge thanks Rob Hopkins and Ruth Ben-Tovim for being the inspiration behind, and contributors to this research. Visit Rob Hopkins' website here to learn more about his book From What is to What if? Unleashing the power of imagination to create the future we want, as well as his ongoing podcast From What If to What Next? each episode, exploring a new 'What if?' question with guests.
The Imagination Sundial was created using the open source, vector graphics software Inkscape.
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This tool is licensed under a Creative Commons BY SA 4.0 license. For full details visit our Licensing Rules. 
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Inge Vandijck
Belgium
I am an economist, impact entrepreneur, and consultant with over 20 years of experience working with large organizations in both the public and private sectors. My expertise lies in Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC), where I have provided consulting and training to help organizations navigate complex challenges and achieve their goals. I see sustainability as the core of risk management, where both threats (negative risks) and opportunities (positive risks) are integral to creating long-term value. As John Adams once said, "Every problem is an opportunity in disguise," and this perspective is central to my approach—transforming challenges into opportunities for sustainable growth and resilience. I named my company Bright Phoenix because the phoenix symbolizes resilience and transformation—qualities I help my clients cultivate as they rise to meet today’s challenges. Learning about the doughnut economic model was a true eureka moment for me. As I delved deeper, I realized I’m not alone—several others in the DEAL community have also expressed similar revelations. The model encapsulates my mission: to guide my clients to operate in the sweet middle of the doughnut—within planetary boundaries while respecting societal needs—ensuring their businesses thrive sustainably. What brings me to the DEAL community is this shared vision. I am excited to contribute my experience as a strategist, systems thinker, and storyteller, while learning from others in this inspiring network.
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annemarieke van de ven
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Lilian Marino
London, Greater London, England, United Kingdom
Bow - East London
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Colleen Cummings
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Achim Arnold
Frome, UK
to be updated
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Jemma Luck
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Anna-Marie Swan
Exeter, UK
Hello! I'm Anna-Marie, an organisational ecologist and embodied facilitator. I currently describe my work as being that of an organisational ecologist and embodied facilitator. After authoring the reimagined story of ecological organisations and the accompanying Ecological Organisations Framework in 2023, released under creative commons, a whole new world has opened up that I'm loving exploring: organisations as edge-less, of relationship, deeply relational, and firmly entangled in social systems, ecosystems, and planetary health. To evolve that work, I founded the Patreon-hosted Ecological Organisations Constellation. Here, we gather around the story of ecological organisations and look to mature it, ground it, evolve our understanding of it and relationship with it, and bring those learnings into wider commons. It's becoming a container for practical, lived experimentation, then integrating our discoveries into our individual and shared work. I write about my work and other things in the substack Cellular Rearranging and host and produce the podcast Generative Worlding. I initiated the first season of Facilitation Pods, now continuing as a commons under co-stewardship. In the pods, we are co-crafting an intimate space for self- and shared-enquiry about facilitation and how we change and are changed by the role, a space that's also become a peer supervision investigating our experiences.
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Ann Dennis
Altamonte Springs, Florida
Greetings! I am an educator, and life long learner. I first heard about the doughnut a few years back on the BBC news video stream and was intrigued as to all the possibilities. Now that a few years have passed I find myself at a school that is adding a middle school (grades 6-8) to the existing elementary school and is attempting to start small and build out. I kept coming back to the idea of the doughnut and the model of sustainability. But on a more personal note the model reminds me of the Level 10 Life and how the doughnut can be used for personal sustainability in many areas of a person's life.
