Crazy Eights: A Design Method
The process of designing for complex problems can be a daunting one. After a long stretch of research and synthesizing it can be fun to implement a design method that gets the creative juices flowing and epic ideas on paper. Crazy 8’s is a design method that allows design teams can make use of when ideating for potential solutions to these complex problems.
“Crazy Eights” is a design method that allows for quick ideation, with a focus on quantity over quality. The idea is that you take each member of a team and for 8 minutes create 8 ideas, each idea taking up one minute. Participants can draw or write down their idea and it can be done in any medium, but is most suited to paper/sticky notes and a writing utensil. So long as the method participant can make changes to whatever they created it they should be fine. Once materials are gathered, the team must designate a time keeper to keep track of how much time is spent on each idea as the the method goes on. Once a team has completed a round of Crazy Eights, everyone participates in a share out and gives context to their ideas. My team used this method virtually. We each drew and annotated with physical materials and then pasted photos of our ideas in our Miro board online.
What was effective about this design method was that it placed more emphasis on quantity over quality. Oftentimes the problem spaces we are operating in can be quite complex. We can get caught up in creating the perfect solution or becoming too attached to an idea. Crazy Eights breaks that down by keeping the cost of time for each idea low. The pressure of time and creating eight ideas can also help to bring out some wild ideas that otherwise would have been missed in a much less pressure sensitive setting. A large quantity of ideas from differing perspectives is most likely to contain a few great ideas or collections of ideas. It is imperative to know that you are not looking for a great idea in a sea of ideas but a collection of ideas that can be meshed together, stolen from, rewritten, or redrawn to make the most use out of this design method.
Some disadvantages to this idea are that though the pressures of time and idea quantity can be effective they are not for everyone. Some people may struggle with performance anxiety when conducting this method, especially those that may not be used to this type of work in a workshop setting or are more methodical about their work. Another disadvantage of this activity is that if you fall behind during a round of Crazy Eights it can be difficult to catch up and leads to a snowball effect where less and less time is spent on each idea.
I would recommend this design method to anyone that is looking to energize their team with a fun activity while also tackling a sometimes daunting task of coming up with potential solutions to prototype and test.
