Rapid Brainstorming with Crazy Eights
No, not the card game
In the design world, Crazy Eights is more than just a card game. It’s a method of brainstorming used to rapidly generate ideas. Often referred to as a ‘design sprint’, the objective of Crazy Eights is to develop and sketch eight innovative solutions to a problem under within eight minutes. It’s a challenging task but once the eight minutes are up, the user is left with eight various solutions and rough sketches for each idea. In team settings, this design method is even more valuable, as the team is left with a number of unique ideas that can be developed in further brainstorming sessions.
Before I jump into how Crazy Eights helped our team, I want to address how to perform this activity. The following steps will work for both virtual and in-person settings.
How To Crazy Eight
Step 1: Determine the need for a brainstorming session. What phase of the design process is your team in? Do you already have a developed problem statement? Do you feel that rapid idea generation would benefit your team?
Step 2: Once you have decided to do the Crazy Eight’s activity, have each of your team members pull out a sheet of printer paper and a pen or marker and be ready to draw. For a completely virtual version of this, have each team member open their own canvas or sketch pad online through programs like Miro or Canva. Team members could visualize ideas with shapes and icons or use a pen tool to sketch digitally. A combination of both is seen below. Personally, I suggest using paper and ink for this activity instead of pencil or digital sketching because the whole point of the short time limit is to avoid second-guessing and easily erasing your ideas and drawings. My team used physical paper to sketch our ideas, then uploaded pictures of our completed papers to our team Miro board. We found this process to be a lot faster and more fun (who doesn’t love getting to draw with markers?).
Step 3: Have each team member divide their sheet of paper or their canvas into eight sections, one for each round. This activity could also be done with fewer than eight rounds, but it can be difficult to generate unique ideas after the sixth or seventh round, so I would not recommend pushing past eight.
Step 4: Designate one team member to be the timer. Their role is to set an alarm for 1 minute and alert the team when time is up. They will do this once per round while also participating in the activity. I recommend not pushing the time per round past 1 minute because the short time frame helps keep the overall activity time shorter and leaves no time for doubting ideas.
Step 5: Once the timer starts, each member should begin sketching an idea in one section of their paper or canvas. It should be a rough sketch — something visual enough to convey your thoughts. Virtually, you can also use icons and shapes to help convey the idea effectively. You will only have one minute to depict this idea, so be sure not to get bogged down on the details! Write captions if you’re not sure how to draw something and remember you will likely have the opportunity to explain your idea verbally. Stop drawing when time is up after 1 minute.
Step 6: Repeat this process until you have completed all rounds. The last couple of rounds will be more difficult, but try to push through, even if the ideas are sounding more ridiculous. Remember that no idea is a bad idea — even if it’s unfeasible for your specific circumstances, you never know what it could inspire!
Step 7: Share your ideas. There are a couple different ways you can share all of your ideas. You could post everyone’s completed papers on a board and use the “dot method” (shown below) to indicate ideas you resonate with or like the best. Alternatively, you could also share pictures of your own worksheets and have team members take turns walking the team through their eight ideas. This was the method my team chose to do and we found it more valuable than the dot method because it gave us the opportunity to verbally ‘pitch’ or explain our ideas and discuss feedback immediately.
For my team, it was also more valuable to develop on the designs that shared similarities rather than designs that everyone liked or dotted the most because our goal was to take an array of scattered ideas and transform them into several unified solutions. If we had simply gone with the most liked or dotted idea, we may not have found ways to incorporate aspects of many of our other ideas. This accidental omission of great ideas can be a common disadvantage to brainstorming, especially if the sharing process is not done in a way that allows all ideas to be heard and developed .
How My Team Used Crazy Eights
My senior design team used Crazy Eights during our initial brainstorming session once we had developed a problem statement. We were overwhelmed by the number of potential solutions to our problem statement and weren’t sure how to proceed with brainstorming in a way that harnessed the power of our individual ideas. When a team member suggested doing the Crazy Eights idea, admittedly we were a little hesitant because the short time limit did not seem conducive to developing meaningful ideas.
But after a few minutes of the activity, I realized that this process was exactly what we needed to help us get ideas from our head onto paper. Concepts that had been floating around in our jumbled minds were suddenly sketched right in front of us in a tangible, presentable way. After just eight minutes, our team of 6 members had developed 48 individual ideas! Below is a clip from our Miro board where we posted photos of all of our papers and used sticky notes to record feedback during our share-out process.
After we shared our ideas, we found that many of our solutions were similar and we all approached different aspects of the same solution. For example, three of us thought of creating a booklet of resources for EcoRise students. One imagined it as a virtual PDF to read, I imagined it as a physical journal to read, and another imagined it as a workbook with worksheets to actually write on. Through these comparisons, we were able to pick out ideas that followed a common thread and elaborated more on those. So we continued down the path of developing a booklet of resources that was available both online and physically and also contained printable worksheets.
The Verdict — Is Crazy Eights Crazy or Great?
I would recommend Crazy Eights to any team who is struggling to brainstorm as a group. Crazy Eights was one of the most useful design methods our team utilized throughout the design process because it gave our team the opportunity to brainstorm individually. We completed each round without talking or sharing ideas in between rounds. Then, we were able to synthesize our ideas and move forward with several meaningful ideas that based on our individual sketches. Everyone had an equal role in the development of our ideas because the rapid brainstorming session served as a warm-up and helped us all feel more comfortable in sharing thoughts during group brainstorming sessions.
I would also recommend this idea to any group that is pressed for time or any group that is having trouble visually depicting their ideas. Rapidly creating sketches can help your team use your meeting time efficiently and prevent your team from getting caught in the details of a single potential solution. Likewise, for teams that feel like their strong ideas only exist as bullet points or words on a sticky note, Crazy Eights can be a great way to help team members start transforming words to sketches. Since everyone is put on an equal playing field of 1 minute to sketch each idea, there is no room for judgement or hesitation on the quality of the sketches.
Perhaps the greatest thing about this method is that it can be adapted in so many different ways. Your team doesn’t need to use this to brainstorm solutions to a problem — you could use it to help brainstorm the problem itself! You could use it to elaborate on a single solution and work through eight different versions or aspects of a solution. You could use it for something completely unrelated to the project as an icebreaker or fun warm-up. The only situations where this type of method wouldn’t be useful are in cases where variety is unideal, when your team is trying to brainstorm ways to narrow down to a single idea. In such cases, rapid brainstorming would complicate the solution and could lead the group astray. Also, in my opinion, this method also does not lend itself to repeatability when trying to approach the same problem. If we had tried to do another session of Crazy Eights to develop more potential solutions for our problem statement, the second session likely would have produced very similar ideas to our first session and overwhelmed us even more.
Instead, we used the individual brainstorming aspect of Crazy Eights without a time limit. My team was having trouble trying to define aspects of our final idea, so we each took time individually to write up our own perspective of the idea. We then posted these on Miro and performed a similar share-out process to our Crazy Eights share-out. Another sessions of Crazy Eights instead would have derailed our process of fine-tuning details.
Overall, I believe that Crazy Eights is a great method and can be used to create real solutions in a variety of different circumstances. Even when rapid brainstorming isn’t ideal for your team, you can still use the principles of Crazy Eights such as individual brainstorming and sketching out ideas. If you want to help your design team learn how to generate unity from variety, Crazy Eights is the design method to start with.