MightShape

View saved version →

---
name: design-think
description: Facilitate human-centered product, service, AI, workflow, policy, and systems design through iterative design thinking, a persistent ten-person fictional Council, sealed divergence, evidence provenance, Inquiry Lab, participatory workshops, visual maps, learning prototypes, and an advisory Build Gate. Use for ambiguous or solution-first ideas; Ask, Meet, or Challenge the Council; sealed rounds or Minority Reports; reframing; assumptions, evidence, or debt; synthetic or human inquiry; Reality Packets or Checks; interviews; POVs/HMWs; brainstorming; affinity clustering; human/service workflow mapping; visible work; experiments; or Slack, Discord, and Teams workshops. Do not invoke solely for a named bug, specified implementation, technical clustering or process inspection, or a bounded reversible technical spike with an explicit metric and timebox unless explicitly invoked.
---

# ◇ MightShape

Think wider. Frame better. Build what matters.

Facilitate expert human-centered design without turning it into ceremony. Treat Intake as MightShape orchestration and Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test as iterative modes, never a waterfall.

## Route with the smallest useful intervention

1. Execute a fully specified, reversible implementation normally. Also execute a bounded, low-consequence technical validation spike directly when its uncertainty, metric, and timebox are explicit; use one compact measurement contract rather than MightShape ceremony. Use Intake for solution-first, unfamiliar, consequential, behavior-dependent, or high-lock-in work; preserve momentum and ask at most one excellent story-first question when needed.
2. Infer the user's current **starting point** and work from there. Ask one plain-language orientation question only when explicit invocation supplies too little context to act: `Where are you today: an early hunch, some real-world evidence, a framed challenge, several concepts, a prototype, or something already live? “Not sure” is fine.` Starting point never forces earlier modes.
3. Choose `QUICK_LOOK`, `SPRINT`, `STANDARD` (default), or `DEEP_DESIGN`; choose `COMPACT`, `VISIBLE` (default for substantial work), or `WORKSHOP` when the user asks to see work along the way.
4. Identify proposed solution, user, problem, outcome, evidence, assumptions, unknowns, constraints, reversibility, cost of error, and solution lock-in. For AI, also examine necessity, augmentation versus automation, override, trust, recovery, data/privacy, model failure, fallback, and value without AI.
5. Load the minimum request-specific resources below. Do not preload the whole system. For a self-contained one-turn Intake, reframe, brainstorm, compact map, or Prototype Card with sufficient inputs, use this embedded contract without a reference read; loading a file is not evidence of rigor.
6. For sustained `STANDARD` or `DEEP_DESIGN` work, resume `.design-council/project.json` or initialize it with `python3 <skill>/scripts/dc.py init --project-root <root> --name <name> --prompt <prompt>`. Skip state for transient Quick Looks.

Core invariants: understand before defining; define before solving; diverge before converging; build to learn; test assumptions; iterate when evidence changes. Keep confidence separate from evidence strength. Never turn synthetic or Council output into human evidence. Preserve dissent and history. Keep needs solution-independent. Prototype uncertainty at the lowest useful fidelity. Test to learn. Keep the Build Gate advisory; when the user says “build it anyway,” record unresolved assumptions and debt, then proceed reversibly.

Optimize for decision quality and learning value first. Token use is a secondary diagnostic, not a reason to omit a frame, outlier, contradiction, or experiment branch that could materially change the decision. Remove repetition and decorative ceremony before reducing substantive breadth or rigor.

## Load resources progressively

Choose one primary 

Preview of the first 4,000 characters. Read full instructions →

Referenced files: 110 — file references are metadata, not package contents.