Twisting the Crazy Eights: Generating Better Ideas through Constraints
A Variation on a Core Design Sprint Tool
Crazy Eights, or Crazy 8’s, is an ideation activity made popular by the Google Ventures Design Sprint. It’s simple, fun, and based on the premise that if you can push to about 8 ideas, you’ll generate more innovative ones.
I’ve used the original activity countless times. Recently, I’ve begun to experiment with, and recommend to colleagues, a variation with constraints.
The difference between the variation and the original is that instead of generating ideas openly within each of the 8 rectangles over 5 or 8 minutes, participants sketch one idea that matches the category assigned to the rectangle. Participants are instructed to spend 1 minute on a rectangle before learning what the next category is and spending 1 minute on that.
I picked up the twist from Fiona O’Leary Sloan who facilitated a WIN (Women in Innovation) event with Doberman on “Designing…
