The Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination is being created at UC San Diego (UCSD) by the University of California, San Diego and the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation.

The Clarke Center will develop, catalyze and be a global resource for innovative research and education “drawing upon the under-utilized resources of human imagination.” It will span a wide range of disciplines and fields such as technology, education, engineering, health, science, industry, environment, entertainment and the arts. 

The center will work with academia and industry and also draw upon the creative worlds of media and the arts. Contemporary science fiction authors such as UC San Diego alumni David Brin, Kim Stanley Robinson, Vernor Vinge, Greg Benford and Greg Bear are involved.

Sheldon Brown, named the center’s director, is a professor in the Department of Visual Arts at UCSD and the former director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts at UCSD’s California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technologies. 

Brown said:

As we harness more and more technology, we must also nurture our human resources – including our unique gifts of imagination to create, innovate and sustain constructive advances. By making human imagination itself the subject of study, we can develop ways to make more effective use of it.  We believe the center can become a unique global resource near term and long term.

The Clarke Foundation chose UCSD from among several universities that responded to its request for proposals to create the new center.

[Thanks to Gregory Benford for the story.]