(2022-01-09) Brander Scamper Is A Procedural Idea Generator

Gordon Brander: SCAMPER is a procedural idea generator. I’ve been digging through literature on creative methods and building up a library of “Oracular DNA” for Geists to draw from. While doing this research I ran into a really cool mental tool — SCAMPER. SCAMPER is a design method pioneered by Alex Faickney Osborn, the person who formalized brainstorming methodologies. It’s a general-purpose idea generator. (idea generation)

SCAMPER is a set of verbs you can apply to any subject to rapidly generate ideas.
Substitute
Combine
Adapt, Adjust
Modify, Magnify, Minify
Put to other uses
Eliminate
Reverse, Rearrange

Each SCAMPER verb can be seen as a kind of mutation operation.

The iPhone: Combine features from an iPod, a mobile phone, and an internet browser, eliminate the hardware keyboard and magnify the screen.

You can use SCAMPER as a kind of mental procedural generator for evolving ideas. Take a project you’re working on, focus in on a component, part, or process, and run it through SCAMPER questions:

You can generate a large number of new ideas very quickly this way. Many of them will be bad, but some of them will be good… and you only need one of them to be good.