oblique strategies
In 1975, musician Brian Eno and painter Peter Schmidt created a deck of cards containing short statements or questions. Called 'Oblique Strategies, over one hundred worthwhile dilemmas', they were designed to help in moments of creative deadlock. Ranging from practical to silly to zen-like philosophical advice, some cards are specific to music, but most are applicable in all creative processes.
Some random examples:
- Bridges (burn)
- Revaluation (a warm feeling)
- Define an area as 'safe' and use it as an anchor
- Look closely at the most embarrassing details and amplify them
- Short circuit (example: a man eating peas with the idea that they will improve his virility shovels them straight into his lap)
Like many brainstorming methods in vogue today - for instance, Edward de Bono's lateral thinking - their aim is to force the mind out of its habitual pattern, into a new direction or towards a different solution. As Eno later recounted in an interview:
The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation - particularly in studios - tended to make me quickly forget that there were others ways of working and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach. If you're in a panic, you tend to take the head-on approach because it seems to be the one that's going to yield the best results Of course, that often isn't the case - it's just the most obvious and - apparently - reliable method. The function of the Oblique Strategies was, initially, to serve as a series of prompts which said, "Don't forget that you could adopt *this* attitude," or "Don't forget you could adopt *that* attitude."
Since then, several limited editions of the pack have been published, including the fifth edition which is still for sale. But these days there are lots of online and downloadable versions as well.