Crazy 8s

My first thought upon encountering the “Crazy 8s” design method was, “That sounds like a waste of time”. One of my weaknesses as a designer is excessive practicality, my instinct is to disregard any idea that seems to lack feasibility. Consequentially, I found the idea of a design method that welcomes outlandish ideas to be bizarre. If the end goal is to produce something meaningful and actionable, how could such an activity be productive? Well, after utilizing this method with my design team, I can humbly admit that I was wrong.

The goal of the Crazy 8s design method is to produce a large quantity of ideas in a short span of time. The strict use of a timer provides the added benefit of liberating the designer from any preconceived notions of how practical or cultivated his or her ideas should be. Not only do I consider it to be the most beneficial design method that I have encountered to date, it is also remarkably easy to employ. Each designer on a team will begin with eight boxes, either drawn on a piece of paper or virtually accessible. One designer will then set a timer for 8 minutes, at which point each member of the team will begin to sketch eight quick ideas. Once the timer goes off, the ideation period has ended, and everyone stops sketching. From here, there are a few different directions a team may choose to go. They may present their top three ideas to the group, or an additional timer may be set for six minutes to allow the designers to develop those three ideas further, prior to presenting. For my team, it was at this point that we made a slight alteration in our use of the method. As time management has posed a challenge for us in the past, we elected not to set the additional timer. However, because we were transitioning into the prototyping phase of our design work, we felt that it was important to share all the possibilities that we had come up with. To prevent this portion of the activity from becoming too time-consuming, each team member had only three minutes to communicate all of their ideas. Although Crazy 8s was not the first ideation exercise utilized by my team, in spite of its brief and simplistic nature, it managed to precipitate a dramatic shift in our path towards our final deliverable. Previously, we had been exploring a wide variety of potential avenues that we hoped we lead us to a productive solution, but as we debriefed our Crazy 8 ideas, it was impossible to ignore the emerging theme of gamification. Suddenly, our design work had gained an entirely new direction.

As I mentioned at the start of this post, out-of-the-box thinking has been a struggle for me in my past design work. During ideation for past design initiatives, I have allowed myself to be limited by what sounds reasonable at first glance, rather than being accepting of avant-garde ideas, and experimenting to see if they can be scaled down to a more realistic application. One of the greatest advantages of Crazy 8s is how well it lends itself to that practice, making it an excellent design tool for me specifically, in addition to its inherent benefits of promoting creativity and the generation of a breadth of prospects. Though the possibility of conjuring ideas that cannot be realistically accomplished is a genuine disadvantage of the method, my team did not find it to pose any significant hindrance. In conclusion, I highly recommend employing Crazy 8s at the start of the prototyping phase for every design endeavor, as I certainly intend to.