Who Put Words in My Imagination?
Somewhere in a design classroom, a student wants to create packaging that grows old with the product inside it. Another is developing an interactive story for children in which the villain changes depending on who is reading. Somewhere else, a young artist is trying to write a statement about identity, memory and the Anthropocene, hoping these three rather enormous words will somehow accommodate a collection of objects that began with a much smaller, stranger and considerably more personal observation. I find something fascinating about these moments, particularly the instant when an imagination encounters the requirement to explain itself, because the words we choose begin doing things to our ideas long before we realise what is happening. They suggest materials, summon associations, establish relationships, introduce expectations and occasionally send an entire project in a direction that its creator had never consciously intended.
Take the packaging that grows old. What does growing old actually mean here? Does the surface wrinkle? Does the colour fade? Does the package acquire scars, develop a smell, become fragile, or begin remembering the hands that have touched it? A single phrase can generate an entire collection of material experiments, and the interesting part is that none of these possibilities existed in the original idea with quite the same clarity. They emerged because the designer chose to describe packaging through a vocabulary usually associated with living bodies. Change ‘grows old’ to ‘biodegrades’ and the imagination moves towards material science, decomposition and environmental performance. Change it to ‘remembers,’ and the package begins acquiring an entirely different relationship with its owner. All three propositions could lead to fascinating work, but they would probably produce different questions, different sketches and different objects.
This is where I have begun to suspect that we underestimate language as a creative material. We spend considerable time teaching young artists and designers to manipulate form, colour, texture, composition, movement and space, while treating the words through which they conceive their work as relatively transparent instruments of communication. We encourage experimentation with materials but often expect conceptual statements to follow recognisable conventions, as though imagination happens somewhere inside the mind and language simply arrives afterwards to explain what happened. Yet anyone who has struggled to describe an idea knows that the act of description can change the idea itself, sometimes revealing something that was previously obscure, sometimes reducing a complicated experience to a familiar category, and occasionally producing an unexpected possibility through a misunderstanding, an awkward expression or an accidental metaphor.
Then there is the rather inconvenient question of where our words come from, who taught us to use them, and why some descriptions sound intelligent while others require an explanation before anyone takes them seriously.
The problem with calling everything a problem
I have spent enough time in design classrooms to recognise the peculiar authority of the problem statement. A student arrives with an observation, an irritation, a fascination or a half-formed idea, and somewhere in the educational process we ask them to convert it into a problem that can be clearly defined, researched and eventually addressed through a solution. This procedure has considerable practical value, particularly when design must respond to material needs, coordinate complicated systems or negotiate the requirements of multiple participants. But it also introduces a particular way of imagining creative work, one in which the world becomes a collection of situations awaiting identification, intervention and improvement.
Suppose a student wants to work with the everyday life of an old neighbourhood. The first description might identify inadequate infrastructure, inefficient circulation or a lack of accessible public spaces. These are legitimate concerns, and the resulting project might improve people’s lives. But imagine beginning with the neighbourhood’s unofficial names for its streets, the conversations that occur outside particular shops, the arrangements through which neighbours borrow things from one another, or the memory of a demolished building that continues to exist in the directions people give strangers. Suddenly the same place begins suggesting other forms of inquiry. A communication designer might develop a living archive of neighbourhood language, a filmmaker might construct a narrative around disappearing landmarks, and an interaction designer might investigate how people navigate through memory rather than maps.
The neighbourhood has remained materially the same, although our attention has moved through it differently. This matters because a design brief can quietly decide what deserves attention before the designer has encountered the full complexity of the situation. Words such as ‘user’, ‘stakeholder’, ‘need’, ‘innovation’ and ‘solution’ have become so familiar within professional design practice that they often arrive with the authority of common sense. A person described as a user becomes someone whose interactions can be observed, mapped and improved. Describe the same person as a worker, neighbour, migrant, craftsperson or member of a collective, and other relationships begin demanding attention. The categories overlap, of course, and a thoughtful designer can move between them, but each asks us to look at the world from a particular position.
Even the word ‘solution’ deserves a little suspicion. A solution suggests that something has been identified as a problem and that a sufficiently appropriate intervention might resolve it. This works well when designing a safer crossing or improving the accessibility of a public service. It becomes considerably more complicated when a creative inquiry concerns grief, belonging, cultural memory, or the experience of living through ecological uncertainty. An artist might want to preserve a contradiction. A filmmaker might want an audience to remain uncomfortable. A designer might discover that making a conflict visible matters more than proposing an object that claims to resolve it.
Perhaps we should occasionally ask students what they want to disturb, complicate, remember, celebrate or make strange, and see what happens when these words replace the familiar demand to solve something.
A forest that gets lost inside a child
Imagine two children’s stories. In the first, a child gets lost in a forest. In the second, a forest gets lost inside a child.
The first sentence offers an immediately recognisable narrative situation. There is a child, an unfamiliar environment, a journey, and the possibility of danger or discovery. The second rearranges the relationship between the same elements and produces a rather different imaginative problem. How does a forest become lost? What does it mean for a landscape to exist inside a person? Could trees grow from memories? Might the child gradually forget the names of birds while the forest inside them begins disappearing? Could the story become an interactive experience in which readers help recover the forest by remembering sounds, smells and fragments of stories?
The alteration is grammatically simple, but its creative consequences can become extensive. The words have changed their relationship with one another, and the imagination must now negotiate a world in which the ordinary rules of that relationship have been disturbed.
This is hardly a new discovery. Writers, poets and artists have spent centuries doing extraordinary things with the instability of language, inventing creatures, rearranging syntax, producing impossible situations and allowing words to acquire meanings that ordinary communication would struggle to accommodate. Sukumar Ray’s Abol Tabol remains one of my favourite examples of this pleasure. Its nonsense grows through Bengali rhythm, invented creatures, absurd situations and an intelligence that understands how ridiculous language can become when its familiar rules are pushed in unexpected directions. The poems also carry satire and social observation, reminding us that nonsense can expose the absurdity of things we have learned to accept as perfectly reasonable.
There is something especially interesting about reading such work alongside the experiments of Dada, concrete poetry or the verbal inventions that circulate through contemporary internet culture. Their historical circumstances differ enormously, and each belongs to a particular cultural and political world, but they share an interest in what happens when language becomes something to play with rather than something to obey. A word can become an image, a sentence can become a performance, and a deliberately impossible proposition can make familiar relationships appear suddenly questionable.
The creative possibilities become even more complicated when we recognise that language is never simply a private collection of words available for individual experimentation. We inherit it through families, schools, communities, institutions and the historical relationships through which some ways of speaking acquire greater authority than others.
Who gets to decide what sounds intelligent?
In 1835, Thomas Babington Macaulay argued for the promotion of English education in British India, placing European knowledge within a hierarchy that explicitly devalued Indian intellectual traditions. His proposal belonged to a much larger and contested history of colonial education, involving indigenous institutions, Persianate scholarship, Sanskritic traditions, vernacular literary cultures, missionary education and competing administrative interests. Yet the document remains revealing because it connected language with the practical requirements of colonial governance and with the production of a class educated through the intellectual and cultural priorities of British rule.
The consequences of colonial education extended beyond the acquisition of English. Language became entangled with employment, administrative recognition, cultural prestige and the authority to determine what constituted legitimate knowledge. English literary education, for instance, helped establish particular models of cultural judgement and intellectual distinction within colonial institutions, even as Indian writers and thinkers appropriated the language for purposes that frequently challenged imperial authority.
I find it difficult to examine this history without thinking about the contemporary creative classroom, particularly the moment when a student translates an experience encountered through one language into a presentation that must become intelligible through another. A student might spend days speaking with craftspeople in Gujarati, listening to the ways they describe their materials, tools, relationships and inherited practices, only to return to the classroom and begin organising the experience through the language of research objectives, user needs, market opportunities and design interventions. The translation may clarify important aspects of the inquiry, but it may also alter the relationships through which the student initially understood what was happening.
Imagine a craftsperson describing a particular material through its behaviour during different seasons, its relationship with the body, or the memories associated with its use. The student may translate these observations into categories of material properties, ergonomics or cultural significance, each useful within a particular professional context. Yet something may happen during the movement between these vocabularies. A relationship understood through practice becomes a property that can be documented, an experience becomes a research insight, and a way of knowing acquired through repeated engagement with material becomes information available for application elsewhere.
The problem lies in the unequal authority between these forms of articulation. The language of professional design often arrives already recognised as a legitimate method of explanation, while the language through which the experience was originally encountered must demonstrate its relevance before it can enter the academic conversation. The student learns to translate the world into the vocabulary through which the institution knows how to evaluate it.
This is a particularly complicated inheritance in postcolonial societies because the languages of everyday experience, cultural memory and professional legitimacy frequently occupy unequal positions. English offers access to education, employment and global circulation, and for many historically marginalised communities it has also provided opportunities to challenge oppressive local hierarchies. Indian languages themselves carry histories of caste, class, regional authority and unequal access to literacy, making any simple celebration of indigenous language politically inadequate. The question concerns the conditions under which different languages encounter one another, and the authority to decide which forms of knowledge require translation before they can be recognised.
A student should be able to use English with extraordinary precision and still question the categories through which English-language professional education has learned to organise the world. The two possibilities can exist together.
Beauty is a strange word to give an artist
Ask a group of students to create something beautiful and watch how quickly certain associations begin appearing. Some may imagine symmetry, others harmony, elegance, ornament, emotional intensity or visual pleasure. Their responses will depend upon personal histories, cultural experiences, education and the visual material through which they have learned to recognise beauty. The word seems simple until we begin asking what it actually directs us to notice.
Now introduce rasa into the conversation. The concept belongs to a long and complicated history of Indian aesthetic thought, particularly through the Natyashastra and subsequent philosophical interpretations that examine how artistic representation produces aesthetic experience. Rasa carries relationships between expression, emotion, performance and spectatorship that cannot be adequately understood by treating it as another word for beauty. The difference matters because changing the conceptual vocabulary of an aesthetic inquiry can alter the questions we ask of the work.
A student examining a performance through beauty might attend to its formal organisation, expressive qualities or the pleasure of its visual and emotional relationships. Approaching the same performance through rasa may encourage attention towards how aesthetic experience emerges through the relationships between representation, emotional states and the spectator. The results would depend upon how well the student understands either tradition, and the exercise would become most interesting when the two vocabularies begin revealing their own limitations.
I would be curious to see what happens when a design classroom treats such differences as material for experimentation. What if students were asked to develop the same creative proposition through two conceptual vocabularies, observing how their choices change? What if an artist began with a vernacular expression that resisted immediate translation, allowing the difficulty of finding an equivalent to become part of the work? What if a filmmaker used a word from a familiar cultural context to organise a scene, then attempted to reconstruct the scene through a different language and noticed which relationships began shifting?
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These exercises would make language visible as an active participant in creative work, while allowing students to investigate how cultural concepts move between different traditions without assuming that every expression must possess a perfect equivalent elsewhere.
Identity, the Anthropocene and other enormous words
Contemporary art has developed a fascinating vocabulary through which young artists learn to describe their practices. Identity, memory, displacement, the archive, materiality, ecology, the body and the Anthropocene circulate through exhibitions, proposals, artist statements and academic conversations, often providing important ways to connect personal experiences with wider historical and political questions.
These concepts have serious intellectual histories, and their usefulness deserves recognition. The Anthropocene, for instance, has allowed artists to investigate the relationships between human activity, ecological transformation and planetary change, while also generating important criticism concerning the unequal responsibility for environmental destruction. Colonial extraction, industrial capitalism and the geographical distribution of ecological damage complicate any account that treats humanity as a single, undifferentiated agent of planetary transformation.
Yet I remain interested in the moment when a young artist discovers that a deeply personal observation can be translated into one of these internationally recognisable categories. A collection of objects recovered from a polluted river might begin with the memory of swimming there as a child, with the smell of water during a particular season, or with the disappearance of a species that once occupied the riverbank. Somewhere during the development of the work, the artist may begin describing it through ecological precarity, material memory and the Anthropocene, concepts that can illuminate important dimensions of the practice while also introducing expectations about how environmental art should be articulated.
The relationship can become particularly complicated within postcolonial artistic practice, where institutions may expect artists to address identity, migration, cultural difference or historical trauma in ways that remain legible to international exhibition audiences. These subjects have generated extraordinary work, but the expectation that particular artists should repeatedly explain themselves through recognisable narratives of cultural difference can quietly become another boundary around creative possibility.
Sometimes a young artist from a postcolonial society might simply want to make a ridiculous object, an obsessively detailed drawing, an extravagant decorative surface or a film about something that has absolutely no interest in representing an entire cultural history. Such work can still carry political significance through its material conditions, institutional circulation and relationships with established aesthetic expectations, but its value should not depend upon the artist performing a recognisable account of postcolonial identity.
The language through which creative work becomes publicly intelligible can help produce opportunities for exhibition, funding and critical engagement. It can also influence the kinds of work that artists begin imagining because they have learned what institutions are prepared to recognise.
The internet has been conducting its own language experiments
One of the more entertaining things about contemporary digital culture is how casually people invent new forms of expression through combinations of words, images, sounds and references that would have appeared almost incomprehensible outside their immediate contexts. A reaction image can communicate an emotional situation without requiring an explanatory sentence, a deliberately misspelt caption can acquire a tone that conventional grammar would struggle to reproduce, and a meme can generate meaning through the collision of an apparently unrelated image and phrase.
These practices are neither exclusive to Gen Z nor entirely unprecedented, but the speed with which they circulate through digital platforms has made linguistic experimentation part of everyday cultural participation. A young person can move between regional slang, English-language internet humour, gaming vocabulary, animation references and expressions borrowed from different online communities, sometimes within a single conversation.
I find this particularly interesting in Indian creative classrooms, where students frequently inhabit linguistic worlds that are considerably more complicated than the official language of their academic work suggests. A student might think through Gujarati, speak with friends in Hindi, consume English-language tutorials, borrow visual references from Japanese animation, follow Korean popular culture and communicate through memes whose meanings depend upon several overlapping cultural contexts. Their creative imagination develops through these encounters, often producing combinations that resist easy classification as either local or global.
Yet the same student may struggle to explain an experimental project through the formal vocabulary of a design jury. This difficulty can reflect genuine problems of conceptual development, but it can also reveal a distance between the expressive systems through which students have learned to make meaning and the institutional language through which their work must acquire legitimacy.
The situation deserves more attention than the familiar complaint that young people have stopped communicating properly. They are communicating through rapidly changing conventions that require cultural knowledge, contextual interpretation and considerable sensitivity to tone. The educational challenge involves helping students move critically between these expressive worlds, developing the capacity to articulate complex ideas while retaining the experimental possibilities of the languages they already use.
There is also a political dimension to this freedom. Digital platforms reward particular formats, global entertainment industries distribute cultural visibility unevenly, and the apparent spontaneity of internet expression develops within commercial systems that influence what circulates, what becomes recognisable and what disappears. The linguistic imagination of a generation is shaped through these conditions, even as young people continually invent ways of using the available materials for purposes that exceed the intentions of the platforms themselves.
And now the machines want us to describe everything
Generative AI has introduced another curious relationship between language and creative imagination. A designer describes an object and receives an image. A filmmaker writes a scene and watches a system produce a visual interpretation. An artist enters a collection of words and receives a series of possibilities that can be accepted, rejected, modified or used as the starting point for further experimentation.
The experience can feel remarkably immediate, but the system’s interpretation emerges through computational processes shaped by training data, statistical associations and the uneven cultural representation of images and descriptions. The words entered into a prompt encounter an enormous collection of learned relationships between language and visual form, many of which reflect the conventions of widely circulated photography, illustration, advertising, entertainment and digital imagery.
Ask for a futuristic city and observe the architectural assumptions that begin appearing. Ask for a traditional Indian home and examine which regional, historical and class-specific references the system combines into a supposedly representative image. Ask for a beautiful landscape and consider how frequently the resulting composition resembles the conventions of commercial photography. The exact results will vary between systems and prompts, but the exercise reveals how generative models can reproduce familiar visual associations while appearing to offer almost unlimited creative variation.
For someone working across postcolonial cultural contexts, this becomes an important question about representation. Certain concepts may be readily interpreted because they are extensively represented within the material through which a system has been trained, while others require elaborate explanation or produce results shaped by stereotypes and incomplete cultural associations.
The creative practitioner must therefore negotiate another language of recognition, one in which an idea becomes visually available through the system’s learned associations. The prompt becomes a peculiar kind of design brief, and the resulting image can influence subsequent imagination by making particular visual possibilities immediately available while leaving others more difficult to generate.
I find this relationship worth examining because it brings us back to the problem of inherited vocabulary through a very contemporary technological encounter. We describe what we want to imagine, the machine interprets our words through its own learned representations, and the resulting image begins influencing what we might imagine next. The process can become an extraordinary site of experimentation when we investigate its assumptions, question its recurring visual conventions and use its failures to discover the limits of the language through which we have described an idea.
It can also become a remarkably efficient way of reproducing familiar imagery while mistaking the speed of production for the expansion of imagination.
What happens when we change the words?
I keep returning to the creative classroom because it offers a practical place to investigate these questions. A student arrives with an idea that has yet to become fully articulate, and the educational process begins helping them develop the relationships between observation, imagination, material experimentation and expression. The responsibility involves teaching clarity and critical judgement, but it also involves recognising that the language through which a student explains an idea can alter what the idea becomes.
I would like to see more experiments in which students are asked to rewrite a familiar design brief through different vocabularies, beginning with the words that seem so obvious that nobody has thought to question them. A project about improving a public space might become an inquiry into remembering a place, sharing a place or negotiating belonging. A packaging project might begin through decay, intimacy or embarrassment. An interactive narrative might emerge from an impossible sentence that forces the designer to invent an unfamiliar relationship between its characters and their world.
Such experiments would produce different results depending upon the people, materials and situations involved. Their purpose would be to make the act of framing available for examination, encouraging students to recognise how words direct attention and how creative possibilities change when familiar categories are disturbed.
The postcolonial dimension requires us to extend this inquiry into the unequal relationships between languages and institutions. A student should be able to work through concepts inherited from different cultural traditions without being required to translate every difference into an already familiar professional category. At the same time, the histories of caste, class, gender and regional authority within Indian knowledge traditions demand that we examine whose language is being recovered, whose experiences remain marginal and who possesses the institutional authority to decide what counts as legitimate knowledge.
The freedom to imagine differently depends upon more than the availability of alternative words. It also depends upon the conditions through which people acquire access to education, cultural resources, professional opportunities and the institutions that recognise creative work.
What interests me most is the possibility of treating language with the same experimental seriousness that we bring to materials, images and technologies. We could examine a word before allowing it to organise an entire project, investigate the cultural assumptions through which a concept becomes familiar, and occasionally invent an expression simply because the available vocabulary has failed to accommodate something we want to make.
A designer might discover that the word ‘solution’ has been pushing an inquiry towards premature closure. An artist might realise that a familiar curatorial category has begun influencing the direction of a practice. A filmmaker might find that a scene becomes more interesting when a sentence is translated imperfectly, allowing an unexpected relationship to emerge through the difficulty of finding an equivalent.
These discoveries would rarely produce a universal method for creativity, and that is part of their appeal. They would encourage a more attentive relationship with the words through which we recognise, organise and communicate our ideas, allowing language to become something we can question, manipulate and transform.
We inherit words from families, schools, books, institutions, political histories and the countless conversations through which we learn to recognise the world, and we spend much of our creative lives rearranging those words in the hope of making something that did not previously exist. Sometimes the rearrangement produces an object, a story, a film or an artwork. Sometimes it produces a question that changes the direction of an entire inquiry. And occasionally, through a rather fortunate misunderstanding, we discover that an idea we thought we understood has become something considerably stranger.
Before asking whether we are thinking outside the box, I would like to know who taught us to call it a box, what else it might have been called, and what extraordinary things we might begin imagining if we allowed ourselves to name it differently.
