Define an area as “safe” and use it as an anchor
Growing up, my father had a little black box on his bookshelf that had OBLIQUE STRATEGIES in gold lettering on the side. Inside was a deck of around 100 cards, with single lines written on each card. Invented by Brian Eno & Peter Schmidt, these act as creative prompts to get someone out of writer’s block. Years ago, I got a deck of my own; it sits in my office, on the shelf next to my desk.
Oblique Strategies try to make you more neuroflexible within the span of one sentence. They work well because they don’t presume much about the work itself, only the mental state of the creator. You are here, wondering what comes next; they say “maybe not what you’re thinking” in response.
Before Draft enters deep rest, here is a power ranking of the top 10 Oblique Strategies cards of 2022.
10. Overtly resist change
You hire value-based designers if and only if you’re willing to change. The whole point is change. You’re wondering what you’re missing, and you want to reinvent some things.
We don’t come in to fix some bugs and walk off. We come in to create cultural, operational, and strategic change. Or maybe you do, because you want to feel good about yourself, and you don’t change anyway.
We can smell frauds from a mile off. There is discernment.
9. Distorting time
“Time is fake” is a key phrase of the year, but I don’t think it’s very true. Time is consensus, how we exist in right relationship, how we honor boundaries.
We all spent a few years having a curious relationship to time, and now that we’re consciously gathering again, it’s hard to recenter ourselves. Nowhere is this more evident than in our relationship to time: the way we demand time from others, the way we accept demands for time into our own sphere, the way that we show love & care through the time & attention we provide one another.
It is necessary to cultivate a healthy relationship to time. To recognize time as something to be worked with. To know the weight of time. To not shrink in fear from the necessary linearity of time. The collective forgot this, and we’re struggling to remember anew.
8. Ask people to work against their better judgement
People started setting healthy boundaries and those in power called it “quiet quitting.” Workers are ceasing to trust the structures that we built to exist in polite society.
What is faith now in one’s work practice? What brings us to trust one another that we’re able to do the right thing?
7. Listen to the quiet voice
Relatedly, what is the role of intuition now, when your intuition is frequently proven to be incorrect? How do we trust others if we find it hard to trust ourselves?
6. Honor thy error as a hidden intention
I think I have no idea whether I’m making mistakes anymore. Is that insane? I used to have more self-awareness about what worked and what didn’t. Is this all part of a messier creative process? What if the intention is just to practice the work and see what comes out of it?
5. Would anybody want it?
It is easy to feel unwanted when every household-name business is laying off your colleagues. They do so at their own peril, of course, and will come to realize this over time. But it brings into question the impact of your own work.
I’m halfway through my next book, and I don’t know if anyone is going to want to buy it. I don’t even know if online stores care about capital-D Design anymore. They want “quick wins” and visual glitz, not the necessary work of customer understanding. In my darker moments, I find myself wondering why I bother at all.
I was talking with a friend the other day, and I said that designers probably need to fix the big value levers before moving into customer research. Put another way, if your business is leaking money with a busted checkout form, fix the form. Then you’ll have enough political capital to do research.
Most businesses have many significant usability flaws that any qualified value-based designer would instantly & easily fix. Why aren’t we doing that first? Wouldn’t that make us a little more desirable?
4. Simply a matter of work
There are no gods but showing up.
3. Consider different fading systems
It’s a common theme of the past few years that everything needs to be burned down and we need to start over. What happens if the new thing is just as undesirable? What if escape from the structures that harm us is harder than we thought?
I don’t mean to be fatalistic by saying this. I mean that every system has its own beat, its own benefits & drawbacks. Who’s in? Who’s out?
2. Look closely at the most embarrassing details and amplify them
You are always your biggest critic. Deliberate practice forces you to look at what’s wrong, and devise plans for fixing it.
What if you did the opposite? What if you doubled down on the things that looked ugly or cringe? What if that was the whole point?
1. The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten
We don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t know what we need to remember, because we don’t know we need to remember in the first place. The vagaries of contemporary life force us away from the core of our identities. It is necessary to come home to ourselves, to practice coming home to ourselves.
Knowing this, one must ask: why do we have to come home to ourselves in the first place?