Random Object Generator

How to use the random object generator

1. Press Generate or the Space bar. You get one everyday object, with the room you’d usually find it in and its size.
2. Choose rooms under Filters — Kitchen, Office, Garden & outdoors and eight more — to keep the objects relevant to where you are.
3. Set How many for a batch of up to 20 different objects: a whole scavenger-hunt list or a set of props in one tap.
4. Leave Don’t repeat on so the same stapler doesn’t turn up twice in a session; Reset clears its memory.
5. Copy the names, Download list to save every matching object as a CSV file, or Share a link that opens this page with your filters.

What to do with random objects

• Sketch warm-ups. Switch on Easy to draw only, give yourself two minutes per object and draw three in a row. Simple forms like a coffee mug or a padlock train line and proportion without the pressure of a big subject. For a team drawing game, the pictionary-style word generator adds a timer and scores. (Pictionary is a trademark of its owner, and Unbiased Wheel is not affiliated with or endorsed by them.)
• Improv props. Each player gets a random object and has to start a scene with it — or mime using a broom as if it were that object, until someone guesses. Or play a round with the charades generator.
• Office scavenger hunt. Filter by Office and Pocket-sized, generate ten objects and give teams fifteen minutes to bring back as many as they can find.
• Describe it without naming it. One person reads the object silently and describes it; the others guess. It’s a classic warm-up for language groups and workshops, and objects like a whisk or a spirit level make it harder than you’d expect. For single words of any kind, try the random word generator.
• Twenty questions. One player generates an object in secret; the others ask yes-or-no questions and get only the room as a hint. Twenty questions without the answer and the secret keeper wins.
• Writing prompts. Generate one object for a short story: it must appear in the first sentence and matter by the last.
• Product-design exercises. Generate two objects and design one product that combines them, or take a single object and list ten ways to improve it. Designers call this forced connection, and random inputs are what make it work.
• Memory games. Generate eight objects, study them for thirty seconds, hide the screen and write down as many as you remember.

Filters explained

• Room — eleven places where you’d most likely find the object: Kitchen, Office, Living room, Bedroom, Bathroom, Garden & outdoors, Workshop & tools, Clothing & accessories, Tech, Sports & leisure, and Travel. Press several rooms to combine them.
• Size — Pocket-sized fits in a pocket (a key, a coin purse), Handheld is small enough to hold in one hand (a kettle, a hammer), and Large is about laptop-sized or bigger, from a desk lamp to a wardrobe.
• Easy to draw only — keeps the objects built from simple shapes. Switch it off to include trickier ones, like a bicycle or a whisk.

Different filters narrow the list together: Kitchen plus Pocket-sized leaves only small kitchen things. The counter shows how many objects match, and Reset filters brings the whole list back.

Random object, item or thing: what’s on the list

Whether you search for a random object, a random item or a random thing, you usually want the same: a concrete, everyday something you could pick up, point at or draw. That’s what this random thing generator picks from — 337 physical objects you’d find at home, at work, outdoors or in a travel bag. It leaves out animals and food, which have their own generators, and it has no brand names, so you get “smartphone” rather than any maker’s model. Every object has a room, a size and an easy-to-draw flag, and many have an emoji so the card reads well from across a room.

The biggest groups are Sports & leisure (40 objects), Kitchen (32) and Tech (31), and every room has at least 28. A few old favorites are in on purpose — a floppy disk, a fax machine, a videotape — because they’re fun to draw and to describe to anyone who never used one. About this list under the tool explains the size rules and shows when the list was last updated.

For living subjects, try the random animal generator. For complete sketch ideas with a twist or a scene, use the random drawing generator, and for something to talk about rather than hold, the random topic generator.