This article is based on personal experience in the discipline of architecture that argues for imagination as a driver of new knowledge production, hopefully by describing my academic and practice journey. It is about the practical realization of outcomes rooted in a creative imagination; the tension between reality and fantasy, and synthesizing multiple concerns of a place, creating something meaningful for a place and to the inhabitants. The story of my academic journey is grounded in how I have creatively applied my knowledge of the discipline to explore current social phenomena in the place that has been home for three decades, South Africa. My professional journey driven by a practice that imaginatively, within the particularities of place, has attempted to make visible pathways from which to change beliefs and attitudes that bind me to authoritative knowledge. In the tension between academic and professional journeys, the former biased by what I have learnt and know, and the latter, a creative exploration of imagination, knowledge is not authoritative or alternate. It is a collection of dynamic experiences; collective understandings in different life-worlds. It is new.

The discipline of sociology focuses on interactions and group processes from the perspective of emergent phenomena at the social level. Concepts like social embedding, norms, group-level motivation, or status hierarchies can only be defined and conceptualized in contexts in which individuals are involved in social interaction. Such concepts share the property of being social facts that cannot be changed by individual intention alone and that require some element of individual adjustment to the socially given condition. Sociologists study the embeddedness of individual motivations or preferences in the context of social phenomena as such and the impact of these phenomena on individual adaptation. However, these phenomena can only be observed in individual human behavior, and this tension between the substantive focus on the aggregate level and the analytical focus on the individual level is the challenge that sociological experiments confront.