2027 Imagining Creative Worlds
Imagining Sustainable Worlds is an annual online symposium in the Common Ground Imagining Futures Series exploring sustainability, climate change, resilience, food systems, health, aging, tourism, and the built and natural environments across related fields and Research Networks.
For 2027, the symposium is hosted by the On Sustainability Research Network, which serves as the primary membership home for the event and helps shape the year’s particular emphasis.
At the same time, the symposium is designed as a broader interdisciplinary space for exchange across connected sustainability-focused fields. Participants from the following Research Networks are invited into conversation as part of the wider Common Ground ecology:
Imagining Creative Worlds is one of four annual Online Symposia in the Common Ground Imagining Futures Series, alongside Imagining Human Worlds, Imagining Social Worlds, and Imagining Sustainable Worlds.
Each symposium in the series is designed as a more concentrated forum for emerging questions, interdisciplinary engagement, and sustained discussion around a unifying theme. In this way, Imagining Creative Worlds is both a distinct event in its own right and part of a wider framework for dialogue, publication, and field formation across a connected ecology of research and practice.
The symposium creates opportunities for dialogue across disciplines that are often closely connected in practice, but separated institutionally or academically, bringing together scholars, researchers, artists, designers, educators, museum professionals, publishers, and cultural practitioners in a shared online environment.
Imagining Creative Worlds is also part of Common Ground’s ongoing work on the knowledge experience: the question of how research communities gather, exchange, document, and develop work across connected digital environments. In this sense, the symposium is not only a venue for presentation and discussion, but also a practical experiment in more continuous and collaborative forms of scholarly communication.
Hosted by the Common Ground Media Lab, the symposium is connected to a wider program of research, design, and platform development. Through CGScholar, Common Ground’s in-house platform, the event brings together live exchange, asynchronous participation, publication pathways, and collective outcomes within a single environment. The symposium therefore contributes both to the life of its participating Research Networks and to the Media Lab’s ongoing work in designing and testing new forms of knowledge practice.
