references/methods-ideate.md

# Ideate method cards

All methods run under protected divergence. Capture every idea before evaluation and preserve outliers.

## Classic Brainstorm — `public_design_practice`

Generate aloud around one HMW, build on ideas, seek quantity and range, and defer judgment. Use a short time box and a visible capture surface. Avoid status-dominated discussion; switch to brainwriting if voices are uneven.

**Participatory route:** ask for one idea or build-on at a time and capture it before any coaching. During divergence, coaching may expand distance but never rank or reject.

## Brainwriting — `supplemental_design_practice`

Generate silently and independently before sharing. Pass anonymous kernels for extension. Use when anchoring, hierarchy, or airtime threatens breadth. Do not turn the silent round into premature voting.

**Participatory route:** keep the user's independent batch unrevealed until the declared share/freeze boundary. Do not leak Council or other participant ideas into the user's generation prompt.

## Yes-And — `public_design_practice`

Find a useful kernel and add a mechanism, context, or consequence. In Council work, anonymize after the sealed freeze. Extend rather than praise or judge.

## Crazy Eights — `supplemental_design_practice`

Create eight distinct sketches or mechanisms quickly. Force each panel to change a meaningful dimension, not just layout. Use when visual/interaction range matters.

## Worst Possible Idea — `supplemental_design_practice`

Deliberately generate harmful, unusable, or absurd responses within safe discussion boundaries; then extract the violated value or invert a mechanism. Never ship or normalize harmful ideas.

## Opposite World / Inversion — `mightshape_original`

Reverse who acts, what is scarce, the default, the incentive, the channel, or the desired behavior. Ask what the inversion reveals rather than treating it as a gimmick.

## Constraint Storm — `mightshape_original`

Add a purposeful constraint—no screen, no training, two minutes, intermittent connectivity, one staff member—and generate within it. Use constraints that reveal a principle.

## Constraint Removal — `mightshape_original`

Temporarily remove money, time, policy, interface, expertise, or existing roles to expose the underlying value. Restore reality during convergence.

## Analogy Storm — `supplemental_design_practice`

Transfer mechanisms from researched analogous settings. Name both the shared mechanism and the mismatch. Avoid decorative “what would X do?” answers without grounding.

## Mash-Up — `supplemental_design_practice`

Combine one element from two distant concept or context sets and explain the new mechanism. Require more than juxtaposed features.

## Extreme User — `public_design_practice`

Generate for amplified contexts revealed through empathy work. Use the mechanism to expand the mainstream space; do not stereotype or assume one extreme represents a group.

## Powers of Ten — `public_design_practice`

Ideate at radically different scales of person, time, organization, cost, or reach. Capture which assumptions break at each scale.

## Assumption Busting — `mightshape_original`

Select a pivotal assumption, negate it, and create concepts that remain useful. This exposes optionality and tests whether the concept depends on an invented constraint.

## First Principles — `supplemental_design_practice`

Separate desired outcome, immutable constraints, and inherited conventions. Recompose mechanisms from the first two. Do not label an untested belief “fundamental.”

## Role Storming — `supplemental_design_practice`

Temporarily ideate from an actor, organization, or stakeholder logic. Do not confuse role storming with a deep Human Model or evidence about that actor.

## Human-Only — `mightshape_original`

Ban automation and design a person-to-person service, ritual, script, or support structure. Use to reveal where judgment, trust, and care create value.

## Technology-Only — `mightshape_original`

Explore a fully automated extreme to expose data, override, accountability, and failure-recovery assumptions. This is a boundary probe, not an endorsement.

## 10× — `mightshape_original`

Assume demand, complexity, or consequence is ten times larger. Generate mechanisms that change the system rather than merely add capacity.

## 1/10 Cost — `mightshape_original`

Reduce financial, attention, staffing, or time cost by an order of magnitude. Look for elimination, reuse, self-service, changed responsibility, and narrower scope.

## Zero Interface — `mightshape_original`

Delete the app/dashboard and achieve the outcome through environment, default, protocol, physical signal, integration, or human coordination. Use this when a feature list has captured the idea space.

## Concept selection — `mightshape_original`

After divergence, compare learning value, desirability, feasibility, viability, accessibility, adoption, systems effects, assumptions, and reversibility. Preserve likely, delight, system, cheap-test, and long-shot bets rather than one vote winner.