Rita J. King is a leadership advisor, ethnographer, and entrepreneur who has spent more than two decades studying the relationship between humans and our evolving technology and tools. She is the creator of Power Pairs, a color-coded method for expanding behavioral range. She believes this period is the Imagination Age, a fleeting time between the fading industrial era and the hybrid reality that has not yet fully taken shape, in which humanity has the chance to reimagine our culture, economy, and shared systems.
Her methods for Applied Imagination and radical observation have been featured in Manoush Zomorodi’s Bored and Brilliant, Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing, and Brian Reich’s The Imagination Gap. As a Futurist at NASA Langley’s think tank, the National Institute of Aerospace, King served as creative director for a feasibility study reimagining the future of interdisciplinary scientific collaboration. As an Innovator-in-Residence at IBM, she explored the business value of virtual platforms and experimented with new approaches to software architecture, telepresence, and augmented reality. As a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, King co-designed and delivered a global study across five continents investigating how digital groups transform physical culture.
Prior to her advisory career, King was an investigative journalist whose work on complex systems, including the nuclear industry and the impact of digital culture on the physical world, appeared across major media. Her investigative reporting has been widely cited. She has been featured in The New York Times, The Village Voice, The Wall Street Journal, in USA Today, Good Morning America, People Magazine, NPR, CNN and many more.
King has designed and delivered keynotes and workshops for many companies and organizations and has advised multiple Fortune 50 companies on leadership, culture, and the future of work. She is a Senior Fellow at the Salzburg Global Forum and holds an honorary doctorate in Applied Imagination from Centenary University.
Practitioners of the emergent field of Speculative Futures Studies use speculative forms – including, but not limited to, art, literature, and theory- to confront the legacies of imperialism, colonialism, and racism in order to imagine and enact more sustainable and just futures.
Science explains it, but
art may be the key to finding it.
The Speculative Futures Collective seeks to cultivate research with faculty, graduate students, and community members using speculative cultural forms and theories to collaborate on the future of education, ecology, gender, sexuality, and race.
Practitioners of the emergent field of Speculative Futures Studies use speculative forms – including, but not limited to, art, literature, and theory- to confront the legacies of imperialism, colonialism, and racism in order to imagine and enact more sustainable and just futures.
Science explains it, but
art may be the key to finding it.
The Speculative Futures Collective seeks to cultivate research with faculty, graduate students, and community members using speculative cultural forms and theories to collaborate on the future of education, ecology, gender, sexuality, and race.
Unlike intelligence, memory, and creativity, there is an alarming lack of coherent theory and a thin empirical literature on imagination. Why alarming? Imagination may be one of the most important keys to human flourishing and human progress, with spiritual and evolutionary adaptive benefit.
The science of imagination needs a guide for the future.
The Atlas of Imagination is the guide, focusing coherent theoretical models of imagination to drive further investigation and the tools needed for the empirical study of the neurodiversity of imagination.
Unlike intelligence, memory, and creativity, there is an alarming lack of coherent theory and a thin empirical literature on imagination. Why alarming? Imagination may be one of the most important keys to human flourishing and human progress, with spiritual and evolutionary adaptive benefit.
The science of imagination needs
a guide for the future.
The Atlas of Imagination is the guide, focusing coherent theoretical models of imagination to drive further investigation and the tools needed for the empirical study of the neurodiversity of imagination.
The Clarke Center is a research-and-practice hub, where the best insights from the neuroscience of imagination are connected with the latest in technology and put to use to unlock the transformative power of imagination across age groups, and communities to tackle the most pressing issues facing the planet.
Imagination discovers
new possibilities within the impossible.
Imagination is at the root of empathy and compassion. Imagination gives rise to hope. We aim to unleash the power of imagination to tackle the most pressing issues facing life on Earth – to envision and build a more equitable an sustainable world.
