Surrealist games and exotic names Collaborative, iterative, and generative exercises in drawing and making Lohren Deeg, Taylor Metz, and Richard Tursky, Ball State University USA Keywords: Creativity, Design Thinking, Surrealist Art, Drawing Methods, E-Learning Abstract In the interests of enhanced collaborative methods of design thinking, design communication, representation, and rapid ideation, the authors of this paper examine how a series of related activities and events, borrowing the term “Catena” (1), could create a clearer, more meaningful, and more efficient portfolio of work for a beginning design studio. Drawing inspiration from collaborative games the Surrealists used to generate ideas, and using the artifacts from such activities to create generative design products and iterations, this paper chronicles a series of active in-class collaborations over the course of a semester that allowed a “post-millennial” (2) generation of students to envision Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities (3) in ways that addressed their observed attention spans in this decade of the information age and in the context of a distance learning situation spurred by a global pandemic. Introduction Working with students lumped into the term “Generation Z” (4) presents the educator with a series of challenges. Surrounded by access to instant information, and emerging from a secondary educational system built around standardized tests, it is observed that a certain lack of perception which the authors shall term information paralysis is setting in, a paralysis that suggests to students that there is only one answer for every question, that the answer is the very first result found in a query, and that every creative activity can and should be performed only once perfectly. Consequently, the observed members of Generation Z are showing an astoundingly high rate of depression and anxiety once immersed into the fast pace of higher education (5). Ironically, this paralysis is rising in concert with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and the continued tuning of algorithms, increased frequency of computations, and the ability of an automaton to explore alternatives and iterations. It may become wishful thinking for our future educated workforce to keep up. The interruption and trauma to the learning experience associated with Covid-19 deepens the urgency to reexamine and conjure new sparks for learning. The challenges of spatial thinking and agility With deeper regard to the environmental design professions, it is observed that students in said generation also arguably lack a certain geographic and spatial perception, likely due to the sheltered and automotive centric lifestyles of their parents and their suburban dwellings (6). The authors often found it necessary to respond to this phenomenon in studio site visits and field trip activities following observed disorientation with regard to cardinal directions, solar orientation, or visible landmarks. Following a campus closure spurred by the coronavirus outbreak of 2020, the authors designed a home studio-based project that challenged learners to explore open space and passive recreational opportunities in their home communities in the interests of maintaining safe and social distancing measures. Design education can and should respond to these phenomena in the interests of shaping future architects, landscape architects, and urban planners who are agile, creative, critical, and geographically literate. Helping a student to build skills in agility and critical thinking requires one to dramatically address spatial deficiencies. Little did the authors know that the need for adaptability and agility would become immediate and urgent during the timeline of the semester that this study examined in the spring of 2020. Exhuming surrealist collaborative thinking It is argued that design-thinking exercises and surrealist games such as exquisite corpse, frottage (7) and a Texas Rangers exercise called dot-the-i (8) can loosen a first-year design student from their preconceived notions of architectural and civic form, space, and order. Furthermore, these games arguably stimulate imagination toward an exploratory curiosity and enhanced spatial perception of the built environment (Figure 1). With regard to the exploratory spirit of Calvino’s novel, published in 1972, and set as a hypothetical dialogue between explorer Marco Polo and the Kubla Khan, a freed imagination is arguably home to an