What if our democratic system better reflected the complexity and great creative potential of human cohabitation? What if it was powered by the imaginations and dreams of the population?

In this project, a process of explorative drawing sought to speculate on the potential of the imagination in a democratic system. The Beehive was imagined as an empty vessel within which infinite possibilities existed, and then tangents were followed, and ideas generated through a parallel practice of drawing and note-taking. The drawings imagine a world where widespread cultural production is normalised and stimulates a sense of empowerment in a way that our current democratic system does not.

The Cloud Democracy is a finely distributed network through which the citizen can become architect, and their hopes for the country materialised and made tangible in order to both make change and inspire future change.The Cloud is an endless world where the imaginations and dreams of the country are recorded, a collective imagination. The voting system is replaced with a process of ‘cloud-gazing’ that facilitates the upload of imaginations to the Cloud. Individual ideas that would otherwise have little likelihood for change are given space to develop and interact with others, growing in potential. The dream constructions of the Cloud are then downloaded into the real world, tested directly in the areas they are needed. Walls are erected, then breached. A house expands to admit the houseless. Safe passage is assured for school children underneath a plucked up road.

A network of dreams spans both the real and the imagined world. Strolling the streets would reveal the hopes and spatial speculations of your neighbours and small acts of creativity would inspire larger ones to make real change.