Seeing Things: Cultural Hallucinations and the Future of Design Thinking and Foresight

Hallucination is not a malfunction but a feature of cognition. When signals are thin or ambiguous, the mind completes the picture, blending memory, expectation, and feeling into a coherent scene. In 2025 that architecture meets an anxious, high-velocity information climate, so pattern-seeking both comforts and misleads. Seen this way, hallucination offers a framework for design practice and foresight: a generative spark that opens possibility and empathy; a source of error that breeds false certainty and seductive stories; and a diagnostic of context that exposes the conditions shaping perception. The link to making is direct. Human intelligence moves through imagination that explores, sensemaking that checks conditions, and accountability that fixes claims to evidence. The craft is to balance these modes so the creative benefits of a mind that fills gaps are harnessed while its liabilities are contained.

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