Mar­sha Pearce

"The all-in­clu­sive vi­sion which the Gov­ern­ment has for T&T is pros­per­i­ty for all, with­in a frame­work of sus­tain­able de­vel­op­ment," said Dr Bhoen­dra­datt Tewarie, Min­is­ter of Plan­ning and Sus­tain­able De­vel­op­ment. "Sus­tain­able de­vel­op­ment calls for cre­ativ­i­ty and in­no­va­tion. Hu­man imag­i­na­tion is an in­ex­haustible source of cre­ativ­i­ty," he added. Tewarie gave open­ing re­marks at the sec­ond pan­el dis­cus­sion in a se­ries of ac­tiv­i­ties planned in the lead-up to the VI­II Amer­i­c­as Com­pet­i­tive­ness Fo­rum (VI­II ACF), which will be held in T&T in 2014. The theme of the VI­II ACF is The Hu­man Imag­i­na­tion at Work: Dri­ving Com­pet­i­tive­ness, Pow­er­ing In­no­va­tion.The pan­el dis­cus­sion was an op­por­tu­ni­ty for the pub­lic to en­gage in con­ver­sa­tion with four cre­ative lead­ers who were in­vit­ed to speak about the top­ic of the hu­man imag­i­na­tion at work. The pan­el­lists were Steve Ou­ditt, a UWI lec­tur­er, artist and de­sign­er, Nicholas Lok Jack, an ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor of As­so­ci­at­ed Brands Ltd and the pres­i­dent of the T&T Man­u­fac­tur­ers' As­so­ci­a­tion, artist LeRoy Clarke, and Camille Selvon Abra­hams, a teacher and founder of both Full Cir­cle An­i­ma­tion Stu­dio and the An­i­mae Caribe An­i­ma­tion Fes­ti­val.

Ou­ditt ex­pressed the view that what might fu­el the imag­i­na­tion is the ques­tion of why."Ask­ing why gives us new knowl­edge and the abil­i­ty to face fu­ture chal­lenges. 'Why' is the plat­form that we need to evolve," he pro­posed. It is a plat­form up­on which some de­sign­ers around the world are al­ready op­er­at­ing. Ac­cord­ing to Ou­ditt, de­sign­ers with "re­al imag­i­na­tion" are ask­ing the why ques­tion and en­vi­sion­ing ways to solve so­cial is­sues. He drew the au­di­ence's at­ten­tion to The De­men­tia Dog project, an ini­tia­tive in the UK that us­es dogs to help peo­ple with men­tal ill­ness main­tain their rou­tine and re­mind them to take their med­ica­tion. "We do not need an­oth­er chair or ta­ble de­signed," he said fur­ther.Lok Jack shared his ex­pe­ri­ences as a child who imag­ined he was Spi­der-Man and Mac­Gyver. "As a child your imag­i­na­tion goes wild and you think that ma­tur­ing means con­strain­ing that imag­i­na­tion," he said. Yet imag­i­na­tion has a key role to play in busi­ness. He de­scribed what he called cor­po­rate imag­i­na­tion as that which com­pris­es in­di­vid­ual ex­pe­ri­ences, aca­d­e­m­ic train­ing, a con­sid­er­a­tion of so­ci­ety's needs and the com­pe­ti­tion or dri­ve to do bet­ter.

Selvon Abra­hams fo­cused on imag­i­na­tion in the class­room. She raised the is­sue of the need for teach­ers to en­cour­age stu­dents to imag­ine them­selves rather than em­u­lat­ing what they see on tele­vi­sion or in for­eign video games. "Where are we on the screen and what are we giv­ing to the world?" she asked. "We don't just want to take. We should be cre­at­ing," she added.She gave de­tails of a Math for An­i­ma­tion project de­signed at UTT. The project asks stu­dents to cre­ate a city us­ing math­e­mat­ics–a task that, she said, has raised the pass rate in the sub­ject at the school. To put the T&T imag­i­na­tion to work, Selvon Abra­hams rec­om­mend­ed teach­ing stu­dents to be au­then­tic and fear­less even when fac­ing fail­ure, for a lack of suc­cess can be used as a step­ping-stone to im­prove­ment.Clarke ex­posed those in at­ten­dance to the idea of what he saw as the men­tal­i­ty and at­ti­tudes that func­tion as a rock stand­ing in our path and the need for imag­i­na­tion to move it."We do not ex­er­cise much imag­i­na­tion in our space. The rock is so high we can­not get over it. It is so wide we can­not get around it. It is so heavy we can­not get un­der it."We have to un­der­stand that we are the dif­fi­cul­ty. We are the rock. We have to get past our­selves," he shared. "The ques­tion of imag­i­na­tion needs imag­i­na­tion to deal with it," Clarke added.

For in­for­ma­tion about up­com­ing ac­tiv­i­ties and next year's fo­rum vis­it com­pet­i­tive­ness­fo­rum2014.gov.tt or plan­ning.gov.tt