(2022-02-15) Brander Generating Your Own Oblique Strategies

Gordon Brander: Generating your own Oblique Strategies. Here’s an afternoon hack I’ve been playing with—a procedural generator that helps you write your own Oblique Strategies by generating Meta-Oblique Strategies. It’s a little Python script that uses Tracery to generate the beginnings of a creative prompt. Run the script…

These provocations are just starting points, a way of drawing out ideas that are already within you. The game is to expand them into Tweet-sized provocations, infusing them with context, analogies, anecdotes, by hand.

And you’ll get some provocations for writing a prompt:

Why hack this together? Many of the Geists I am prototyping for Subconscious are designed to serve up creative prompts and oracular provocations.

Some of these prompts will be simple and general-purpose. What does this remind me of? How does this change my understanding?

Others will be more complex, algorithmically generated from the context of your notebook, drawing from topical libraries of content. If you’ve ever used IDEO method cards

I’m building up this library of topical atomic prompts that can be used within larger procedural generators

Using a computer to generate permutations is a simple superpower for thinking. It transforms the creative act into a foraging expedition. We’re pretty good at foraging. We’ve been practicing about 300,000 years.