Metaphorical design is a Participatory Design technique suitable for problem setting and concept development. The technique can be particularly constructive when designing (computer) systems in an already digitalized environment. In such contexts, designers might be tempted to draw on readily available technical solutions, thus hampering the discovery of new perspectives. Our use case is the development of a research data platform that aims to provide innovative functionality, especially for assessing and exploring digital resources. We developed a participatory workshop format adapting metaphorical design that first creates a shared understanding of the context and then guides participants to generate metaphors using a projective technique. We show how we used these metaphors to understand the participants’ model of the research data platform, to identify possible domains of activities, and to stimulate new viewpoints on the research data platform and its functionality. With this paper, we provide an application example of the adapted metaphorical design process, propose a metaphor evaluation matrix, and discuss the findings.