DICE — Directions In Creative Entanglement — is a research prototype from Microsoft that uses multimodal large language models to help designers create fresh ideas every day. Its first tool, Metaphor, connects the product you are designing with unexpected inspirational concepts to spark metaphorical design directions.
Designers often ideate by metaphor: a lamp shaped like a sunrise, a chair that feels like a hug. DICE systematizes that move. You give Metaphor a target — the product being designed — and the system proposes source concepts from other domains, then combines target and source into structured suggestions that you can explore, compare and develop further. Because the suggestions come from a multimodal large model, they are diverse and contextually relevant rather than random word pairings, and the structured exploration path helps novice designers in particular get past the blank page and build richer concepts. The repository contains the full web application — a Python backend service and a JavaScript frontend — with setup instructions for both, and a live demo is linked from the project page. DICE accompanies a research paper conditionally accepted to CHI 2025, and the code is MIT licensed, so designers, students and tool builders can study or extend the approach. The repository was last updated in 2025.
DICE is a free research release under the MIT license. There is no commercial version and no hosted plan — it is published by Microsoft’s researchers for the design and HCI community.
It is for product and industrial designers, design students and HCI researchers who want AI-assisted ideation grounded in metaphor — and for developers studying how multimodal models can support creativity tools.