Immaginar(s)i. L’esplorazione del margine tra oggettività e soggettività della rappresentazione

This article, starting with a discussion on the perceptual aspects involved in the relationship between vision and imagination and the parallelism between representation and the functioning of memory, investigates the role of the imagination process in creative and design activity. Firstly, we can analyse vision as a physiological process that identifies an organism’s ability to react to light stimuli by perceiving an image of the observed reality. Instead, we can understand imagination as the faculty to compose and visualise mental images and to process and shape them according to cognitive activity. Consequently, vision provides a series of images generated by observation of reality that are then recombined, mixed, and contaminated by the imagination, which produces different and original images. Secondly, the imagination process consists of a visual dimension and replies to the functioning memory model, articulated in archiving, remembering, and forgetting phases. Precisely due to these characteristics, imagination activity assumes fundamental importance in creative processes and design in general. The modes of reworking, reshuffling, and resignification implemented starting from previously accumulated images constitute the essence of the design act, in which known elements are systematised and integrated according to experimental and innovative logic. This article, by these premises, argues the aspects described, presenting as an exemplary case study the methodological procedure and the conclusive results of a didactic experience initially aimed at the architectural survey and objective representation of domestic space. Given the condition of the pandemic emergency and lockdown, the survey began a profoundly subjective design opportunity. Emotions, dreams, expectations, and fears converged in graphic designs, giving rise to expressive works in which past and present experiences coexist synergist, producing new meanings. The reciprocal interaction between survey drawing and project drawing reaffirmed the unity of a process based on knowledge and catalysed by the imagination, through which each student was able to ‘imagine itself’ and focus on a projected image, helpful to deal with the instability inevitably associated with daily life during the pandemic.