the limits of imagination.

(these are my views on the matter that i came up with today while making coffee for grumpy customers)

Imagination is the creative extrapolation of previous experiances.

OK hear me out...

What i mean is that our imagination although limitless is still restricted by the bounds of our experiance.
For example, we cannot imagine a sixth sense without describing it with one of our previous five senses (say mindreading, we imagine it as hearing the person. aka sound or hearing).
Or the fourth dimension (excluding the whole time theory) how can we imagine a fourth dimension when we have never experenced anything like it (and if you try you'll probablly get 3d images trying to describe it).

im NOT saying our imagination is limited, im saying there are infinite possibilitys, those possibilitys are just restricted to our current experiance. (similar to there being infinite decimal values between 0 and 1, ie 0.1 0.11 0.111 0.1111........ and so on forever)

Maybe genious comes from being able to take a longer leap, or make a further abstraction from what we have already experinced, or to combine several pieces of information into something so different it almost seems random (i think surreal art, why would you put such unrelated things together?.......).

when a new experiance is had, it opens infinatly new possibilitys, which is maybe why people enjoy new things so much.

maybe also intelligence can be measured by a persons ability to construct new information from what they know or their previous experiance, how then is intelligence different from imagination?

well basically yeah thats it, my deep thoughts for the day. ( i do wonder how i came up with these ideas though, imagination and thought are creepy they come from seemingly nowhere, but always have a reason for being there.)

how this relates to design: My design ambition therefore is to give people new experences to enrich the world with the infinate possibilitys they open up.
Design always comes from somewhere (a realisiation ive only just made).. huh i suppose thats why precidant images seem to be held in such high esteem down here at design.