New Metaphors: A Creative Toolkit

EDIT: The cards are now available to download (free) or buy at http://newmetaphors.com

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Could shedding an old skin or plant growth be a metaphor for confidence? What about sweetness as a metaphor for motivation?

Could creating new metaphors help us understand the world in new ways, and imagine different futures? 

Can we generate new ideas and reframe problems we face, within organisations, and in society more widely? 

New Metaphors has been developed over the past three years by the Imaginaries Lab, a design research studio based at Carnegie Mellon University, and working internationally. New Metaphors is a set of 150 cards and a number of simple, fun workshop formats which enable idea generation and new ways of thinking about issues creatively, from specific problems within an interaction design or UX team or organisational context, to much larger questions about our collective futures and our relationships with the planet.

As well as having been used in teaching (in design, architecture, and business schools), we have developed New Metaphors through popular workshops with prototype versions at a number of design industry conferences and events, including IxDA Interaction, UX Lisbon, and Google SPAN. We have also worked with futurists and writers through the Plurality University Network, and prototype versions of the toolkit have been used by designers and researchers at a number of well-known and not-so-well-known organisations in both industry and academia, from Chile to Australia. You can learn more about the development process in this paper presented at the ACM Creativity & Cognition conference in June 2019. Dan Lockton, who leads the Imaginaries Lab, is best known for the Design with Intent toolkit (2010) which has been widely adopted by educators, researchers, designers and businesses worldwide.

We know that the ideas in New Metaphors will have more impact in the world when they are applied and used in real situations, whether by designers or by anyone looking to reframe ideas or generate new approaches to things, whether you see yourself as ‘creative’ or not (you are!). 

While all the New Metaphors materials are free (CC-BY-NC-SA) to download—see below—we're regularly asked how people can buy a physical copy. As we're a new lab with a small operating budget, we have turned to crowdfunding to enable this to happen, as we can make it much more cost-effective for everyone involved if we can get hundreds printed at once, rather than in smaller quantities. Hence this campaign! 

What you'll get for backing New Metaphors

We have various levels of rewards ranging from the toolkits themselves to tailored workshops which we (the Imaginaries Lab) can run for your organisation. The toolkit you'll receive comprises:

• 100 image cards, 127 × 178 mm / 5" × 7"
• 50 concept cards, 63 × 76 mm / 2.5" × 3" (size may change slightly)
• 16-page booklet with suggestions and instructions for workshop activities
• two A3 or 11 × 17" photocopiable worksheets to help structure workshops
• packaged in a box enabling easy access to the cards

The clear plastic boxes shown in some photos here will be replaced by high-quality cardboard boxes, top-opening rather than tuck-type (in our experience these are often inconvenient for actually using card decks in workshops). The plastic boxes have proven too fragile in testing.

Download everything to preview what you'll get

You can download the latest version of the cards, worksheets, and introduction booklet, published together as:

Dan Lockton, Devika Singh, Saloni Sabnis, Michelle Chou (2019). New Metaphors: A Creative Toolkit for Generating Ideas and Reframing Problems. Pittsburgh & Dawlish: Imaginaries Lab, ISBN 978-0-9565421-2-0 (print) ISBN 978-0-9565421-3-7 (PDF)

• The whole toolkit in one file (160 MB pdf), comprising:
  • Introduction booklet (13 MB pdf)
  • Image cards (145 MB pdf)
  • Concept cards (1.7 MB pdf)
  • Worksheets (480 kB pdf)

The cards, booklet, and worksheets are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence. Photos included are by Dan Lockton, Devika Singh, Michelle Chou, Tammar Zea-Wolfson, Shengzhi Wu, Sofía Bosch, Marisa Lu, and Soonho Kwon.

We are aiming to make some improvements to the booklet and worksheets before the crowdfunded version is printed—including incorporating feedback from people who are currently using the cards.

Why are you using Crowdfunder.co.uk when you're based in the US?

Supporters can pledge on a project using major international credit/debit cards. The shipping address defaults to the UK, but you can edit it. 

Although the Imaginaries Lab is currently based out of Carnegie Mellon, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, this crowdfunded project is independent of the university, because it does not allow us to raise money for projects in this way. Hence, Dan Lockton (a UK citizen, from Dawlish, Devon), is running this independently of his employer. New Metaphors is published by Imaginaries Lab—registered with Nielsen as a UK publisher—with a UK ISBN.