Partners
New Museum Festival of Ideas,
Arizona State University

Project
Ideation game for activism

Services
Concept, graphic design

PDA created IDEA cards in order to spark some new  thinking around activism and social change. 

PDA designer, Sarah Sandman, originally created a deck of IDEA cards for a presentation at the New Museum Festival of Ideas. Then, in the Spring of 2015 she collaborated with Jill Peterson to redesign them for a presentation to Phoenix Design Week at Arizona State University.  

Participants are asked to quickly and spontaneously fill in by hand these blank ‘tarot’ cards in the following way:

Issues (i.e. fracking, sex-trafficking, police brutality, climate change, etc)
Do-ers (i.e. any self-identifying group of individuals...ie firemen, skateboarders, vegans, jockeys, etc) 
Environments (i.e. any place...ie the public pool, subway station, grocery store, etc)
Actions (i.e. jump-roping, sledding, bingo playing, etc)

These cards are meant to spark discussion as part of a brainstorming session, but at ASU, we used these cards with our audience to play charades, with small groups guessing each other's new-fangled approach to activism. When cards are pulled and combined at random, they often reveal ridiculous project ideas, but that silliness can also lead somewhere new and fresh. For instance, we all expect environmentalists to march to city hall to protest fracking, but do we expect nurses to dance at Best Buy in support of a living wage for all workers?