A Strategic Evolution in Education, Research and Design.
IMAGI-NATION {University} is a global education initiative developed by AIME as a direct and innovative response to findings across 15+ years of AIME, plus the emergence of the Imagination Declaration in August 2019, a call from young people across Australia and abroad for new, inclusive, and future-focused learning environments. Recognising the limitations of traditional systems in meeting this call, AIME responded with this call by building a different type of university, and committing to build an entire new nation (that later came to be IMAGI-NATION): one that centres imagination, relational intelligence, and Indigenous knowledge systems as core pillars and governance systems for shaping healthy futures.
Since the launch, IMAGI-NATION {University} has expanded AIME’s work to over 52 countries and has been recognised with several global awards, including the Good Design Australia Gold Award for Social Impact (2021) andFast Company’s World Changing Ideas Honourable Mention in Education (2021). This initiative represents a scalable, inclusive, and systems-level approach to transforming education — not by reforming existing structures, but by creating new ones. It offers a model for future-facing institutions that embed relational learning, equity, creativity, and ecological literacy at their core.IMAGI-NATION {University} continues to grow as the educational backbone of the IMAGI-NATION ecosystem — linking local and global networks through embassies, knowledge exchanges, mentorship models, and future-facing economic experiments such as Hoodie Economics. The university is open to collaborators, knowledge holders, educators, and organisations committed to rethinking education and building a world that works for all.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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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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.
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.
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.
View the published texts and tools from our past and current systems change residents.
VISIT THE SYSTEMS CHANGE STUDIOYou 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
Reach out to work with IMAGI-NATION {University} as a research partner / Lab partner / resident to engage us in design or other projects.
CONTACT USAIME 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.
Learn more about the website page updates and our 'always drafting methodology.
Professor Hope
