Magic Moves: 20 Years of Master Imagineering

Date: Thurday 21 May 2026 - 17.00 until 21.00 hours
Location: Chapel, BUas - Mgr. Hopmansstraat 2 in Breda
Please, sign up via this link. (If you are not an alumnus but would still like to take part, the registration fee is 100 euros.)

Programme outline

Opening by Stifani Herpich
Stifani introduces the Master Imagineering as it stands today: a learning ecology that cultivates systemic imagination, artistic intelligence, and the metaskills needed to work generatively in complexity. She reflects on the programme’s evolution and its community of more than 500 alumni worldwide.

Diane Nijs
Twenty years ago, Imagineering began with a question borrowed from the world of experience design: what if we could make people *feel* a different future before they could think it?

Twenty years later, the answer has deepened into something more precise — and more radical.

As founder of the Master Imagineering at Breda University of Applied Sciences, Diane Nijs has spent two decades researching and practising what happens when the logic of creative experience design is applied not to entertainment, but to governance, healthcare, urban transformation, and regional development. The shift she traces is fundamental: from designing experiences to designing *invitations for collective creativity* — conditions under which systems can reorganise themselves around a new ordering principle.

That ordering principle is never imposed. It emerges. And when it does — as *Zie Mij* emerged from Surplus, as *'t Stad is van Iedereen* emerged from Antwerp, as new imaginaries of mobility and water emerged from Ons Brabant Fietst and Ruimte voor de Rivier — it feels, to those inside the system, like something close to magic.

Complexity scientist Doyne Farmer was precise about this: *it's not magic, but it feels like magic.* What he was describing is emergence — the moment a system generates something qualitatively new that none of its parts could have produced alone. That is the phenomenon at the heart of Magic Moves. And it is learnable.

In this keynote, Diane introduces the **3M-framework** — Magic, Mindset, Metaskills — as the architecture for understanding and facilitating this kind of transformation. She closes with the invitation that has guided twenty years of work: keep creating magic. Not to entertain. But to liberate the collective imagination.

Jane Davidson 
One of the deepest problems with conventional politics is its relationship with time. Electoral cycles reward short-term thinking. Budgets demand measurable output. Immediate returns crowd out long-term responsibility. Yet the ecological and social crises of our age are fundamentally intergenerational — they cannot be solved within the horizon of a single mandate.

Wales chose to change that. As Minister for Education and later Minister for Environment and Sustainability, Jane Davidson was the architect of two landmark contributions to generative governance: *The Learning Country* — a national vision for education that placed human flourishing at its centre — and the *Well-being of Future Generations Act*, a piece of legislation that does something almost unprecedented: it installs caring for future generations as a national ordering principle, legally anchored and binding across all public institutions.

The Act doesn't tell policymakers what to decide. It changes the logic within which every decision is made — giving everyone working in public life a legitimate mandate to think and act radically differently. That is what an ordering principle does. And Wales made one law.

For Magic Moves, Jane Davidson brings a rare and living proof: that generative governance is not a theoretical aspiration. It can be designed, enacted, and sustained — at the scale of an entire nation.

A true international example of the magic move in action.

Alumni Panel – Generative Practices Around the World
A lively dialogue with alumni who now work in health care, education, public governance, social innovation, retail, hospitality, mobility, sustainability and regional development.
They reflect on how Imagineering shapes their practice today, how they create “magic moves” in their own systems, and what the next 20 years of generative transformation could look like.