This little 8-minute exercise is a game changer.
Crazy 8’s a creative exercise and is especially useful for people who do not consider themselves to be creative.
The Crazy 8 exercise is used in Design Sprints (but you can use it in almost any meeting) before people start to create their concepts and it’s like having a circular discussion all on your own. It’s a way to amplify ideas and then look at a challenge in a different way. By doing this, you let go of firmly-held ideas and invite new ones in. It all happens within 8 minutes and forces you to think laterally about your challenge
When to Use This Tool
When you'd like to visually explore a concept (big or small) from many different angles or in many different variations in a short time
When you need to re-energize a group during longer ideation processes
As a warm-up before sketching solutions
What You'll Need
10 minutes
1+ participants
Blank sheets of paper and markers/pens
For a remote session
Use a MURAL or Miro template to create a board for the session
Make sure each participant has one sheet of paper and something to write with
Do a quick read-through of the instructions
The instructions
Ask the participants to take their paper and fold it three times, Always in the middle along the narrow side, then unfold it again. The paper should now be divided into 8 boxes of equal size.
Depending on the purpose and scope of the workshop, participants will choose a core feature or idea that is part of their solution and create a different variation of it in each of the eight boxes.
Set a timer for 8 minutes - everyone start drawing!
Every minute, tell participants when it’s time to move on to another box so that they have enough time to fill out as many boxes as possible
When time's up, have everyone share their final sheet of ideas.
What next…
This is the fun part. Now that each person has explored different ideas, you have a group of people open to thinking about things in different ways. To capitalize on this you can…
Ask the group to draw some screens/concepts (give them 20 minutes to expand on their top ideas)
Ask each person to present back how their ideas morphed and changed
Ask each person to present their favorite sketches
If you like this exercise and would like to learn more ways to get your team thinking more creatively then reach out to us for a chat at Wayv.