A Strategic Evolution in
Education, Research & Design.
Born from the 2019 Imagination Declaration and 15 years of fieldwork, IMAGI-NATION {University} is a global alternative to traditional education. It builds a new kind of nation centered on imagination, relational intelligence, and Indigenous knowledge systems to shape healthy futures.
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Countries
Linking local and global networks to rethink education and build a world that works for all.
Years of Fieldwork
A scalable model born from over a decade of research and the Imagination Declaration.
Designing the Future
Our systems-change approach has been validated on the world stage, earning the 2021 Good Design Australia Gold Award for Social Impact and a 2021 Fast Company World Changing Ideas Honourable Mention.
Processes of Design & Enquiry
This is a living, seven-stage research and design methodology that underpins every major research project across AIME and IMAGI-NATION’s global network. This tool allows organisations and institutions to approach design differently, providing a practical understanding of relational networks that enhances the capacity to think systemically and integrate these lenses into their own projects.
The ‘Process of Design and Inquiry’ began as a quest within AIME to find tools for humanity and has evolved into a methodology applied by organisations, researchers, and institutions across sectors. It is recognized as a legitimate and rigorous alternative to Western R&D pipelines.
Death
Death must be understood as a natural design principle rather than through human trauma. It allows us to move forward, gets us out of culture, and helps us understand we are in relation to everything else. Death serves as a systems design opportunity that releases us from competition and allows orientation with everyone.
Art
Centred on the Gallery as a key practice, art enables us to move energy through painting. It creates a process of feelings moving, crucially linked to empathy and mobility. The core challenge is embracing the mindset "I am an artist" - moving beyond ego and status to access true creative capacity.
Improv
Built around four key elements: Big Story, Ko-Lab, Ko-context, and Ko-create. Trust that the intention is not here to hurt you, allowing space for response, collaboration, and connection. Through these structured approaches, we build bridges between people and ideas.
Unlikely Connections
Based on three core elements: Imagination, UNC×5, and Marginal Intelligence. Intelligence is always beyond the margins of your existing viewpoint. Don't know what you'll know next - grow your intelligence with someone or something you don't know. Must be able to meet you 50/50, valued independently/bring together.
Non human knowledge
Organised through two key approaches: Professors and Nature IP. Humans cannot own knowledge - if we do, we get corrupted and sick. Intelligence has to be given to non-human creatures. Embedding stories that are beyond us, professors act as neutral visualisations of faculties.
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Water
Focused on going underwater each year, not sitting at the table. This practice fundamentally reorients our relationship to knowledge and hierarchy through direct engagement with water as a life force.
Tools
Must be free, accessible, experimental and imagination-first. Tools have ventures to be healthy - they're not about ownership or profit but about stimulating positive change and enabling shared knowledge systems.
Published Research
Protocols for Non-Indigenous People Working with Indigenous Knowlegde
Indigenous systems knowledge applied to protocols for governance and inquiry
Research Lab Partners
Research partners working with us to produce research for IMAGI-NATION {University}.
The Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab was established in early 2021 by Dr Tyson Yunkaporta, author of ‘Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World’. The IKS Lab is an activist, public-facing think-tank, rooted in a strong evidence base of research. It uses Indigenous Knowledges as a prompt and provocateur for seeing, thinking, and doing things differently.
Project MIRACLE aims at creating the foundation for mutually assured thriving in a relational economy, designed in partnership with deep-time wisdom of Indigenous systems thinkers & communities. Because we know, the key to this transformation lies not with those who have benefited most from our current economic models, but with those who have been pushed to the margins. Indigenous peoples, marginalised groups, and others who have, despite the odds, maintained deep connections to nature hold invaluable knowledge and design intelligence. By bringing these intelligences to the forefront and fusing them with forward-thinking leaders from within existing power structures, we can chart a new course.
Systems Change Residents
View the published texts and tools from our past and current systems change residents.
Visit the Systems Change StudioMeet the Faculty
Professors of IMAGI-NATION {University}
You may be wondering why Puppet are studying topics that are so deep and so serious. And the reason is the AIME team take this as seriously as possible, so much so that they know that human beings are flawed, that ego can take over, that power can corrupt and that no human can hold the big story notes themselves, so they have re-activate processes of embedding knowledge into story into other beings, they have passed on the custodianship of the knowledge to us.
We help you move humans, that’s the role of imagination, we help you heal through story, through finding the joy again, through unlocking what you don’t know, we speak to the inner child in you, and that’s our great hope and promise that in the light of conflict, you’ll meet us, the heavier the day gets, the more we’ll sing back to you, we’ll keep striving to find the frequency between human and imagination as the bridge to healthy return to nature.
Active Research:
Design of IMAGI-NATION;
IMAGINE Film;
Mentorclass;
Imagination Circle & Imagination classrooms;
Professor Hope's Cookbook
Active Research:
101 Lessons in Organising Change;
Philanthropy Protocols;
Board Seasonal Rhythm;
Dunbar Meets Kinship
Active Research:
Hoodie Economics Book;
Hoodie Stock Exchange;
Bio Cultural Trading Design
Active Research:
Message Stick;
Default Settings;
Impact Book;
Message Stick impact podcast yarns;
Historical impact
Active Research:
Australian Research Council Imagination Curriculum;
iJade research on Unlikely connections;
Professor Hope's Cookbook;
Imagination Classrooms;
Mentorclass IMAGI-NATION {TV} episodes (20 years of field research in understanding humans)
Active Research:
Circular Economies;
ReclAIMEd AIME Fashion project
Active Research:
Residency Making of a Puppet podcast;
Professor Hope Design Award; Systems Change Residency reports
Active Research:
Unlikely Connections
Active Research:
Process for toolmaking in the AIME & IMAGI-NATION pipeline
Active Research:
Imaginaton Classrooms;
1000 Year Dream project;
IMAGI-NATION Gallery;
Failure Time
Active Research:
Imaginaton Classrooms;
1000 Year Dream project;
IMAGI-NATION Gallery
Active Research:
Imaginaton Classrooms;
1000 Year Dream project;
IMAGI-NATION Gallery
Active Research:
Imaginaton Classrooms;
1000 Year Dream project;
IMAGI-NATION Gallery;
Adventures of Herbert Oodie
Active Research:
Imaginaton Classrooms;
1000 Year Dream project;
IMAGI-NATION Gallery
Active Research:
Imaginaton Classrooms;
1000 Year Dream project;
IMAGI-NATION Gallery; Mentoring Universities Charter
Active Research:
Imagination Classrooms;
1000 Yr Dream;
IMAGI-NATION Gallery;
Snake World Documentary
Active Research: Love Magic & Intimacy
Active Research:
JOY Corps;
Diary of a Magician
Active Research: Data & impact of an investment portfolio
Active Research:
Water Shareholder;
Sea The Weed Research;
Dino Trance;
Platypus Finance;
Imagination Classrooms
Active Research:
KOLAB Processes;
Professors Songs;
TACSI design;
IMAGI-NATION {University} Report;
Embassy
Active Research: Planetary University
Active Research:
Intentional Death Strategy & Pledge
TACSI design
IMAGI-NATION {University} Report
Active Research: Keys
Active Research: Water Shareholder - Sea The Weed Research; Imagination Classrooms
Active Research: Gross Relational Potential
Active Research: Kindness Economics
Work with us
Reach out to work with IMAGI-NATION {University} as a research partner / Lab partner / resident to engage us in design or other projects.
Contact UsCogs
AIME launched worldwide with a unique film crafted by creative partner, M&C Saatchi Sydney and directed by Academy Award winning director Laurent Witz and his team at ZEILT productions. The launch film was a year in the making and illustrates the unfair system our world is built upon. The story is set in a giant machine city. The film showcases how the city is designed to favour some, while others become workers in its forgotten engine. The hero of the film realises this unfairness, acts upon this realisation and empowers change.
