This book explains social dreaming by situating it in the context of thinking, culture, and knowledge and distinguishes how it differs from conventional, therapeutic dreaming, making the case for how it can be used in systems, like business organizations, educational institutions, and hospitals.

This book explains social dreaming by situating it in the context of thinking, culture, and knowledge and distinguishes how it differs from conventional, therapeutic dreaming, making the case for how it can be used in systems, like business organizations, educational institutions, and hospitals.

The idea of social dreaming argues that dreams are relevant to the wider social sphere and have a collective resonance that goes beyond the personal narrative. In this fascinating collection, the principles of social dreaming are explored to uncover shared anxieties and prejudices, suggest likely responses, enhance cultural surveys, inform managerial policies and embody community affiliation. Including, for the first time, a coherent epistemology to support the theoretical principles of the field, the book reflects upon and extends the theory and philosophy behind the method, as well as discussing new research in the area, and how social dreaming practice is conducted in a range of localities, situations and circumstances. The book will appeal to anyone interested in the idea that social dreaming can help us to delve deeper into the question of what it means to be human, from psychoanalysts to sociologists and beyond.

"Social Dreaming" is the name given to a method of working with dreams that are shared and associated to within a gathering of people, coming together for this purpose. Its immediate origins date back to the early 1980s. At that time, Gordon Lawrence was on the scientific staff of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. He was a core member of the Institute's Group Relations Programme, within which he had developed a distinctive approach centring around the concept of "relatedness" — that is, the ways in which individual experience and behaviour reflects and is structured by conscious and unconscious constructs of the group or organization in the mind...

This broad range of papers covers different aspects of social dreaming.The book begins with a summary of the Social Dreaming Matrix conceptualised as a temporary system with its intakes, transformation processes and outputs. The remaining chapters cover social dreaming in different contexts including, amongst others, from the perspectives of art, architecture, theatre, working with immigrants, with pilots and lawyers and family mediators and hospitals.All the papers cover areas outside of the goal orientated activities of the institution, and examine what they may be saying about the organization of the participants.

We are running out of ideas in Western society. Faced with global warming, Third World devastation, nuclear proliferation and the threat posed by religious conflict, we need new ways of thinking. After the loss and carnage of the Twentieth Century there is prevailing mood of uncertainty and paranoia, yet at the same time a denial of tragedy, a salvation fantasy, an illusion that we will be saved. The decline in social solidarity, the fragmentation of communal values and a growing sense of 'I' as opposed to 'we', are all signs of an inversion of moral certitudes, a disconnection from reality. This book asks what methods do we have at our disposal to understand and reverse this breakdown of communication within and between communities.

How to use design as a tool to create not only things but ideas, to speculate about possible futures. Today designers often focus on making technology easy to use, sexy, and consumable. In Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby propose a kind of design that is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas. For them, design is a means of speculating about how things could be—to imagine possible futures. This is not the usual sort of predicting or forecasting, spotting trends and extrapolating; these kinds of predictions have been proven wrong, again and again. Instead, Dunne and Raby pose “what if” questions that are intended to open debate and discussion about the kind of future people want (and do not want). Speculative Everything offers a tour through an emerging cultural landscape of design ideas, ideals, and approaches. Dunne and Raby cite examples from their own design and teaching and from other projects from fine art, design, architecture, cinema, and photography. They also draw on futurology, political theory, the philosophy of technology, and literary fiction. They show us, for example, ideas for a solar kitchen restaurant; a flypaper robotic clock; a menstruation machine; a cloud-seeding truck; a phantom-limb sensation recorder; and devices for food foraging that use the tools of synthetic biology. Dunne and Raby contend that if we speculate more—about everything—reality will become more malleable. The ideas freed by speculative design increase the odds of achieving desirable futures.