Imagining-by-acting
(2026 - ∞)
Team:
Inês Nascimento
&
Henrique Andrade
What is it?
Imagining-by-acting does not prescribe a fixed format. It can take the form of a workshop, experimental laboratory, educational programme, curricular unit, residency, collective research process, installation, exhibition, publication or spatial intervention. It may unfold within schools and universities, cultural institutions, community settings or public spaces, adapting its methods to the people, conditions and questions encountered in each context.
It can operate at different durations and scales—from a single exercise or temporary action to a long-term programme in which participants observe, draw, discuss, map, make, test and transform together. The form is not determined in advance: it emerges from the context and evolves through action, dialogue and reflection. What connects these different manifestations is their capacity to turn a space into a temporary site of experimentation, shared knowledge production and collective transformation.
Imagining-by-acting is an adaptable methodological framework for collective learning, spatial experimentation and knowledge production, grounded in the proposition that imagination does not necessarily precede action but can be generated and transformed through it. Developed at the intersection of two doctoral research projects and tested through experimental educational practices, it seeks to expand spatial practice beyond architecture and beyond conventional distinctions between thinking and making, education and practice, or knowledge and action.
The framework understands spatial practice broadly, encompassing the different ways in which artists, architects, designers, educators, researchers, communities and institutions observe, interpret, inhabit and transform space. Rather than beginning with predetermined solutions or finished representations, participants engage directly with existing conditions through drawing, movement, conversation, mapping, material experimentation, construction, testing, failure and adaptation. Action becomes a form of inquiry: a means of revealing spatial, social and institutional conditions while simultaneously producing other ways of imagining them.
Imagining-by-acting could be represented as a circular and relational process structured around four interconnected dimensions: transdisciplinarity and critical thinking; education as making and research; networking as a pedagogical method; and the redefinition of the future spatial practitioner. These dimensions are not successive stages but mutually reinforcing fields, connected through continuous movement between doing and reflecting. Shared knowledge emerges through encounters between different people, disciplines, experiences and forms of expertise, challenging hierarchical models of knowledge transmission and fixed distinctions between teachers, learners and practitioners.
Critical thinking operates throughout this process as a situated practice rather than a purely analytical exercise. It develops through acting upon reality, confronting its constraints, questioning established assumptions, negotiating different perspectives and reflecting collectively on the consequences of intervention. In this sense, criticality is inseparable from the capacity to make, test and revise alternatives.
One of the framework’s points of departure is the recognition that architectural education has often been shaped around fear: fear of being wrong, of failing, of being assessed, of experimenting without a predetermined outcome, of becoming irrelevant, and of imagining beyond what appears possible. These conditions extend beyond architecture into spatial and arts education more broadly, where institutional and professional cultures can discourage uncertainty, risk, deviation and forms of knowledge that emerge through making. This culture of fear also shapes how the architect is portrayed in society: as an individual author expected to possess certainty, maintain control and provide definitive solutions. At the same time, it contributes to treating imagination and experimentation as luxuries within spatial processes—secondary to efficiency, functionality and measurable outcomes—rather than as essential capacities for questioning and transforming existing conditions. Imagining-by-acting instead proposes a more collective, situated and responsive understanding of the spatial practitioner—one capable of acknowledging uncertainty, sharing authorship and learning through action. By creating collective conditions in which fear can be made visible, discussed and negotiated, and by allowing action to precede certainty, failure to produce knowledge and responsibility to be shared, the framework seeks to reclaim experimentation and imagination as essential capacities for learning and spatial practice.
The framework understands spatial practice broadly, encompassing the different ways in which artists, architects, designers, educators, researchers, communities and institutions observe, interpret, inhabit and transform space. Rather than beginning with predetermined solutions or finished representations, participants engage directly with existing conditions through drawing, movement, conversation, mapping, material experimentation, construction, testing, failure and adaptation. Action becomes a form of inquiry: a means of revealing spatial, social and institutional conditions while simultaneously producing other ways of imagining them.
Imagining-by-acting could be represented as a circular and relational process structured around four interconnected dimensions: transdisciplinarity and critical thinking; education as making and research; networking as a pedagogical method; and the redefinition of the future spatial practitioner. These dimensions are not successive stages but mutually reinforcing fields, connected through continuous movement between doing and reflecting. Shared knowledge emerges through encounters between different people, disciplines, experiences and forms of expertise, challenging hierarchical models of knowledge transmission and fixed distinctions between teachers, learners and practitioners.
Critical thinking operates throughout this process as a situated practice rather than a purely analytical exercise. It develops through acting upon reality, confronting its constraints, questioning established assumptions, negotiating different perspectives and reflecting collectively on the consequences of intervention. In this sense, criticality is inseparable from the capacity to make, test and revise alternatives.
One of the framework’s points of departure is the recognition that architectural education has often been shaped around fear: fear of being wrong, of failing, of being assessed, of experimenting without a predetermined outcome, of becoming irrelevant, and of imagining beyond what appears possible. These conditions extend beyond architecture into spatial and arts education more broadly, where institutional and professional cultures can discourage uncertainty, risk, deviation and forms of knowledge that emerge through making. This culture of fear also shapes how the architect is portrayed in society: as an individual author expected to possess certainty, maintain control and provide definitive solutions. At the same time, it contributes to treating imagination and experimentation as luxuries within spatial processes—secondary to efficiency, functionality and measurable outcomes—rather than as essential capacities for questioning and transforming existing conditions. Imagining-by-acting instead proposes a more collective, situated and responsive understanding of the spatial practitioner—one capable of acknowledging uncertainty, sharing authorship and learning through action. By creating collective conditions in which fear can be made visible, discussed and negotiated, and by allowing action to precede certainty, failure to produce knowledge and responsibility to be shared, the framework seeks to reclaim experimentation and imagination as essential capacities for learning and spatial practice.
Within Not Yet, Imagining-by-acting is also an ongoing assignment that we set ourselves: a proposition through which we continue to work, experiment and discover. Rather than being a finished framework with a fixed meaning, it remains open to transformation through the processes, results and forms of knowledge that emerge from each experience. Its possibilities can always be explored further, allowing us both to deepen our own understanding of what Imagining-by-acting might mean and to search for other ways of communicating, testing and enacting it.
With this purpose, we developed a speculative exercise that reimagines Plato’s allegory of the cave, one of the most profound and enduring narratives in the history of education and the search for knowledge, through the perspective of Imagining-by-acting. We asked how the framework might be explained within this familiar narrative if knowledge and imagination were understood as emerging not only through observation and revelation, but also through collective action, experimentation and making. The exercise does not seek to replace or contradict such an important philosophical teaching. Instead, it uses speculation to open further possibilities, revisiting an inherited story, acting upon it and exploring what other understandings it might allow us to produce.
Henrique Andrade & Inês Nascimento 2026