Generate ideas and reframe problems

A 20–60 minute activity for 1+ people

Visit the New Metaphors website for full details and downloads

Is this the activity for your group?

• 20–60 minute duration
• Number of people no upper limit, but for better discussion, groups of 4–6 are best 
• No facilitator required (although with a larger group it may be useful)
• Medium setup
• Low difficulty 
• Medium imaginative load
• Low trust required

Why play this?

• Collective Imagining (Using new metaphors to imagine and reimagine topics and approaches)
• Surfacing worldviews (Understanding each other’s current imaginaries around a topic, through exploring existing metaphors)

A scene from a New Metaphors workshop

Notes for the organiser/facilitator

Full instructions for New Metaphors are available online and in the booklet accompanying the physical cards. This page is a supplement specifically focused on using the New Metaphors cards in the ‘unusual collaborations’ context of the Playing with the Trouble project, with some extra concept cards and worksheets.

Components

• 100 image cards (download here), each of which has a picture of something (natural or human-made, a ‘thing’ or a situation) with a label for it. Each image has been chosen to be something that could in some way work as a metaphor for lots of other things. They are all intended to be able to work at multiple levels, or with multiple facets or elements to them, and trigger other kinds of ideas beyond what’s on the cards themselves.
• 50 red concept cards (download here). These are text-only, each an often abstract concept which we considered was hard to visualise, but nevertheless important for some area of the human experience, technology, society, or our environment. Their inclusion is mainly as a prompt, a set of sample provocations that can work as a warm-up, or to enable you to gain experience using the method.
• 5 extra red concept cards (download here), added for the Playing With The Trouble edition, based on the project purposes.
• Worksheets (download here), which guide participants through different ways to use the cards. The worksheets are not essential, but when first doing the New Metaphors activity, the standard worksheets A and B can be useful. We have added two new sets of worksheets developed via workshops run during Playing With The Trouble: one set covers the Future(s) of Collaboration between disciplines, and the other focuses on New Metaphors for Sustainability (but could easily be adapted to other large, nebulous concepts).      
• Pens or pencils

	100 image cards (a selection shown here) (download here)
	50 concept cards (a selection shown here) (download here)
	5 extra concept cards based on the Playing With The Trouble project purposes (download here)
	Worksheets (download here)
	Future(s) of collaboration and New Metaphors for Sustainability worksheets (download here)

Background and objectives

What if you could expand your conceptual vocabulary — thinking, imagining, and making connections in new ways? New Metaphors is a creative tool for generating ideas and reframing problems, using images and language to offer new perspectives.

Many challenges facing humanity today and in the future are complex, involving relationships, complexities and timescales which are difficult to visualise or make sense of in simple terms. We often use metaphors, unconsciously or otherwise, to make sense of these issues. But these metaphors can also cause particular ways of thinking and framing ideas to become entrenched, sometimes getting us stuck in the same old loops. In such cases, new metaphors can be helpful. New Metaphors can help inspire us to take creative approaches to imagine the future, creating new collaborations, strategies, services, communication campaigns and ways of explaining ideas, and more widely, help reframe societal issues. 

All metaphors are wrong, but some are useful. Coming up with—and discussing—new metaphors together is a disruptive improvisation technique which provides an expanded conceptual vocabulary to help us think differently and reframe issues, together or individually.

In the Playing With The Trouble context, we intend New Metaphors to be useful for both facilitating collective imagining, and surfacing worldviews. For collective imagining, this could be through creating new metaphors to imagine and reimagine topics and approaches, about new forms of collaboration or institutions (curious about this? Listen to Dan talking about this), or more specifically about a particular topic in research or education. For surfacing worldviews, the New Metaphors activity can help participants understand each other’s current imaginaries and assumptions around a topic, through exploring existing metaphors and new ones.

Example

See https://imaginari.es/new-metaphors-introduction-to-the-toolkit/#workshops for illustrated examples of how the New Metaphors cards can be used. Use the Playing with the Trouble concept cards similarly to the other concept cards, but where you specifically want to focus on exploring—and finding new metaphors for—the collaboration topics.     

The Future(s) of Collaboration and New Metaphors for Sustainability worksheets can be used in a similar way to the other worksheets, but have a slightly higher level of guidance built in. New Metaphors for Sustainability combines aspects of worksheets A & B, but with a focus on sustainability specifically, while Future(s) of Collaboration asks participants to go through a process of “seeing” other disciplines for existing metaphors to be surfaced, then a two-stage random provocation, and then more considered metaphor, as a way to arrive at a new kind of collaboration. The worksheets include instructions. 

A CUCo workshop using the New Metaphors cards with the Future(s) of Collaboration worksheets, to explore new ways of thinking about interdisciplinary collaboration. 

New Metaphors was developed by Dan Lockton, Devika Singh, Saloni Sabnis, and Michelle Chou. Full acknowledgements and photo credits.