Marshall McLuhan’s Distant Early Warning card deck was released in 1969 as part of McLuhan’s DEW-Line Newsletter (1968 to 1970). The card deck was intended to stimulate problem-solving and thinking, in a manner that later came to be known as thinking-outside-the-box. The cards were designed by McLuhan, his eldest son Eric, Harley Parker and George Thompson, long-time family friend and assistant to McLuhan at the Center for Culture and Technology. The deck perfectly reflects McLuhan’s vision of the artist in a time of rapid social and technological change: “I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it,” stated Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. The DEW Line was a real thing. Stretching 3,000 miles across arctic Canada, at approximately the 69th parallel, was a chain of 63 integrated radar and communication stations. Completed in 1957, during the height of the Cold War, the DEW Line was intended to provide advance warning of imminent air attacks on Canada and the United States.