Halcyon Imagines

Imagining breaking the ice between strangers...

 

...even, during everyday situations like sitting on a bus.  Theodore Zeldin shows us how.

Imagining answers to some of the most intractable problems...

 

Google recently asked the global public for ideas to address the following societal issues:

• Community: How can we help connect people, build communities and protect unique cultures?
• Opportunity: How can we help people better provide for themselves and their families?
• Energy: How can we help move the world toward safe, clean, inexpensive energy?
• Environment: How can we help promote a cleaner and more sustainable global ecosystem?
• Health: How can we help individuals lead longer, healthier lives?
• Education: How can we help more people get more access to better education?
• Shelter: How can we help ensure that everyone has a safe place to live?
• Everything else: Sometimes the best ideas don't fit into any category at all.

Thousands of people from more than 170 countries submitted more than 150,000 (or around 10^5.2) ideas.  Voting is complete and Google will announce the winning big ideas in the near future.

What other answers can we dream up and enact together?

Imagining the meaning of and the reason for things

AC Grayling talked on Desert Island Discs about 'contributing to the conversation society has with itself about possibilities for good lives in good societies'.

This is exactly what Halcyon will be about too; encouraging frank conversations, between diverse individuals and groups, that help people develop their own "choice architecture" but that do not romanticise particular values.