Imagination and creativity

Michael T. Stuart

University of York

Until recently, very little empirical work has explicitly targeted scientific imagination, despite its obvious importance for scientific practice, especially scientific creativity. We want to know whether and how scientists are taught to imagine, what imagination is used for, whether it is approved for use everywhere or only in certain contexts, how social factors shape it, whether the labour of imagining is equitably distributed, and how much of it AI can/should replace. This talk summarizes a few preliminary answers to these questions which are the result of recent interview-based, observational, and survey-based studies.