Oblique Strategy Cards – More of a thought exercise, but these have been getting more interesting to me. Definitely less on the "getting people started" with generative thinking and more provocative (and frankly entertaining).
A few more…
Title: "Honor the Shadow"
Prompt: "Identify what exists in the shadows of this work—the unspoken, overlooked, or deliberately hidden aspects. Bring these shadows into focus, treating them as essential rather than peripheral. How might centering these shadow elements transform your understanding or approach? Describe in detail what emerges when shadows become substance."
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Title: "Reverse the Polarity"
Prompt: "Find the fundamental polarities or binary oppositions structuring your current thinking. Now systematically reverse them—making foregrounds into backgrounds, causes into effects, questions into answers. Detail what happens when these polarities are flipped, and what new perspectives emerge from this reversal."
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Title: "Cultivate Beautiful Mistakes"
Prompt: "Identify places where precision and control have become limiting. How might intentional imprecision open new possibilities? Describe specific ways to cultivate generative errors, and explore how embracing mistake-making might lead to unexpected discoveries."
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Title: "Listen to the Silences"
Prompt: "Attend carefully to what is not present, not said, not considered in your current approach. What silences, gaps, or absences exist? Describe in detail what these silences might contain or signify, and how giving voice to them might transform your work."
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Title: "Create Unnecessary Connections"
Prompt: "Identify elements that have no obvious relationship to each other. Now imagine they are fundamentally connected in ways not yet understood. Detail the nature of these connections and explore what patterns emerge when seemingly unrelated things are brought into meaningful relationship."
And more…
Title: "Smuggle in the Impossible"
Prompt: "Introduce something seemingly impossible into your current framework. Don't resolve the impossibility—instead, work as if this impossible element were simply an accepted part of reality. Describe in detail how accommodating the impossible transforms your thinking and opens new possibilities."
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Title: "Honor the Threshold"
Prompt: "Identify the thresholds, boundaries, and liminal spaces in your work—places of transition, ambiguity, or between-ness. Focus attention on these thresholds rather than on what lies on either side. Detail what happens when transitions become destinations in themselves."
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Title: "Make it Uncomfortably Slow"
Prompt: "Introduce radical slowness into processes that typically value speed and efficiency. What happens when minutes become hours, or hours become days? Describe specifically how this deceleration affects perception, understanding, and meaning, and what emerges in the spaces that slowness creates."
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Title: "Embrace Inappropriate Scale"
Prompt: "Dramatically change the scale of your thinking—make the microscopic monumental or the enormous intimate. Detail what happens when scale is intentionally mismatched to subject, and how this inappropriate scaling might reveal aspects otherwise invisible at conventional proportions."
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Title: "Cultivate Fertile Ambiguity"
Prompt: "Identify places where clarity and precision have become limiting. Introduce deliberate ambiguity—not as confusion, but as multiplicity of meaning. Describe specific ways this ambiguity creates richness rather than uncertainty, and how it might open spaces for new possibilities."
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Title: "Choreograph the Invisible"
Prompt: "Focus attention on invisible forces, processes, or relationships that shape your work but typically go unnoticed. How might these invisible elements be made perceptible? Detail specific ways to choreograph these invisibilities and what new understandings emerge when they become apparent."
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Title: "Create Secret Purposes"
Prompt: "Imagine this work has secret functions or meanings known only to you. What hidden purposes might it serve? Detail these covert intentions and explore how their presence—even if never revealed—might subtly transform the work's apparent functions."
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Title: "Dismantle and Misassemble"
Prompt: "Take apart the constituent elements of your current approach, then reassemble them according to an unfamiliar logic. What happens when familiar parts form unfamiliar wholes? Describe specifically how this misassembly transforms understanding and function."
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Title: "Befriend the Resistance"
Prompt: "Identify where you're experiencing resistance, difficulty, or friction in your process. Instead of overcoming these obstacles, treat them as allies offering important guidance. Detail what happens when resistance becomes collaboration rather than opposition."
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Title: "Invoke the Ancestors"
Prompt: "Consider how predecessors in your field—or in seemingly unrelated fields—might approach this work. Channel their perspectives not as historical reference but as living presence. Detail how these ancestral viewpoints might transform current thinking and what emerges from this temporal dialogue."
Here's some prompts for future reference:
I am making "Strategy" cards for my design team to use during a Generative AI workshop we're running. I need help writing content for them and want feedback on the overall approach, I want to better articulate it.
In any case, when we say "Strategy" cards, we're referencing Brian Eno's "Oblique Strategies". These were cards Eno made to provoke movement by challenging the artist during a project. Our "Generative Design Strategy Cards" help provoke inspiration or direction to product designers who work alongside the power of LLM's. They consist of prompts that you can give an LLM to do the same. You can either prod the machine and work back and from there, or you can be lazy and just feed it and see what happens. It's up to you, the designer to make that choice.
Our "Strategies" are organized in three categories and will provide an example for each below. They consist of a Title and a Prompt.
## Project Strategies
Title: "Redesign your portfolio."
Prompt: "I want to redesign my portfolio.
Please provide for me a few approaches or strategies that I could take to gather my thoughts. Separately, I’d like to know about my technology options so that I can push this to a production environment."
## Iteration
Title: "Include Real Data"
Prompt:"I’d like to somehow incorporate real data into this project.
Can you outline several approaches I could take, including how to gather, process, and present this data?"
## Oblique Strategies (these are more abstract, intentionally unpredictable prompts)
Title: "Make it Razzle Dazzle"
Prompt:"I want you to make this work “razzle dazzle”. Please define what that means to you.
It’s important that you are extra thorough in your response, in such a way that provides strong guidance to ensure the project is deeply “razzle dazzled”"
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First, tell me if you understand the concept here, and second help me build my library of cards for an upcoming event.
Here's a prompt with an emphasis on creating these "Oblique Strategies":
I need help authoring a set of what I'm calling "Oblique Strategies". They echo Brian Eno's creative provocation exercize, but they are meant to be used when experimenting with LLMs -- helping designers collaborate with AI models in unexpected ways.
Each card should have:
1. A concise, evocative title (3-6 words)
2. A detailed prompt (100-150 words) that:
- Proposes an abstract, unconventional approach
- Asks open-ended questions to stimulate reflection
- Suggests exploring hidden dimensions, paradoxes, or overlooked perspectives
- Incorporates metaphors, frameworks, or concepts from diverse disciplines
Key characteristics to include:
- Abstract rather than literal (avoid direct design instructions)
- Thought-provoking and open to interpretation
- Incorporates concepts from diverse fields (science, art, philosophy, history, sociology, etc.)
- Emphasizes transformation of perspective rather than specific techniques
- Encourages designers to see familiar problems through unfamiliar lenses
- Uses a questioning, exploratory tone rather than prescriptive instructions
Examples of disciplinary approaches to draw from:
- Scientific concepts (quantum mechanics, chaos theory, evolutionary biology)
- Art movements (Dadaism, Cubism, Fluxus, magical realism)
- Philosophical frameworks (phenomenology, Taoism, deconstruction)
- Historical perspectives (ancient navigation techniques, medieval guild structures)
- Social theories (critical race theory, gender performativity, power dynamics)
The ideal strategy card should feel like a provocative koan or thought experiment that opens new creative territories rather than providing straightforward answers.
Please generate 10 unique Oblique Strategy cards that meet these criteria.
To make this into an app:
Can you develop this into a simple app with the react/nextjs/bootstrap/radix/shadcn stack? The data for these cards should be kept in JSON form, so please provide for me a simple data model for these cards along with some ideas for other parameters that these cards might embody.
The more abstract strategies came from this prompt:
Can you make them a bit more abstract, maybe less specific about doing something to a design, but a prompt that also can be flexibly uses for research projects or other exercizes
This was followed by keep going…