Halcyon Imagines

Halcyon curates the most significant imagination-related content from carefully selected sources. Please contact us if you'd like our help with imagination-related challenges.

If the world were a village of 100 people, what would it look like?  Various answers have circulated around the internet for years, but a set of 20 posters provides a visual perspective on this fascinating hypothetical question.

10 years on from chastening and often stunning images of the impact that global recession is having - right now. The Great Depression Revisited? The clothes and the cars and the laptops suggest "not yet", but over the coming months, who knows?

Still, the blooming sunflower in the last shot is a touching piece of photojournalism, suggesting that hope springs eternal or, as Roy Harper put it, "through all destruction flies new dawn".

Does Bitcoin herald a revolution in how we will create, exchange and spend money? Launched in 2009 by an anonymous developer, Bitcoin saw a c.1300% spike in value since the beginning of 2013, before recent steep falls suggested it might be a bubble. The Atlantic noted that starting your own currency is "not as complicated as it sounds.

What did ancient Rome look like in A.D. 320?  Rome Reborn is an international initiative to answer this question and create a 3D digital model of the Eternal City at a time when Rome’s population had reached its peak (about one million) and the first Christian churches were being built.

...of civil society and the individuals within it.  Perhaps this is a more hopeful way of addressing the current economic crisis than much of what we get through the mainstream media.  If we listen more to the surviving members of the "make do and mend" generation that got through the 1930s, WWII and its bleak aftermath, maybe we can learn again not just self-sufficiency, but also a way of pulling together towards a common purpose?

Is it a wrong approach, as claimed recently, to start with your favourite quality or value (freedom, equality, justice etc), and then try to imagine what a society would look like if it were arranged to maximise that quality?

Should we, instead, examine the political and cultural institutions we already have and work from there, as failure to do this might lead to incoherence and fantasy?

Not sure...just because most "-isms" are divisive and fail ultimately, should we really give up on all big ideas and hopes of breakthrough change in favour of sheer pragmatism?