Calibrating Possibility

This essay establishes a link between skills associated with creative writing and the generation of possibilities across other domains. While the essay is written mostly in first person (by Kim), these ideas would not be possible for me to articulate without extended conversation with the rest of the WhatIF Lab team, Helen and Lisa, who are rightly named as co-authors on this work. I would like to tell you that the cognitive estrangement of a multi-author essay written in first person is a deliberate strategy to unsettle the reader into a space of greater possibility; the facts are simply that research is generated and owned in a range of ways that are not always easy to articulate, no matter how fond the academy is of neat edges. Think of what is written here as the team’s ideas, refracted through the lens of an individual’s creative practice; none of which could have reached full maturation without the generative power of long-standing research relationships.