Wonder Cards Storytelling: Imagination, Storytelling, and Role-playing in the Creation of Objects, Spaces, and Experiences

This article presents Wonder Cards, a card-based "imagination instrument" designed to help designers and students create objects, spaces, and experiences through storytelling and role-playing. Grounded in Romantic-era ideas about uniting reason and imagination and in Hélen de Cruz and Jóhan de Smedt's concept of distant analogies, the authors argue that blind-picked cards force unexpected conceptual connections that move participants beyond their habitual repertoires. The deck, split into categories such as Imagination, Sense, Emotion, Object, and Space, is supplemented by expansion modules for Genre, Characters, and Events, along with "Sheets of Imagination" that guide different play modes, including a main role-playing mode.

The experiments took place between 2016 and 2018 at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, involving open public workshops and design classes with more than one hundred students across groups of four to five people. Sessions were audiovisually recorded and followed by debriefings, and the authors report that participants found the random structure freeing and helpful for overcoming blank-page anxiety. Illustrative cases include a murder mystery set in a candy kingdom and a surreal narrative involving a haunted room and a psychologist, both of which the authors present as evidence of narrative creativity. The study is qualitative and small in scale, relying on participant comments and observation rather than formal measurement, and the authors acknowledge that future work should test the cards with broader, non-academic user profiles.