In the 1970s two authors created a box of cards called “Oblique Strategies”. [1] They are supposed to help creative people (musicians) to break creative blocks. It works like this: You get stuck. You pull out a card from the box and ponder it’s meaning which hopefully will help you resolve your problem.

The suggestions are sometimes cryptic. But many suggest a change of perspective. [2] This is useful. Perhaps it is a good idea to start developing our own sets of cards, as well.

There is a website that will randomly give you one card from the original decks. [3] Try it out or read the whole list extracted from that website’s HTML:

• (Organic) machinery

• A line has two sides

• A very small object -Its centre

• Abandon desire

• Abandon normal instructions

• Accept advice

• Accretion

• Adding on

• Allow an easement (an easement is the abandonment of a stricture)

• Always first steps

• Always give yourself credit for having more than personality

• Always the first steps

• Are there sections? Consider transitions

• Ask people to work against their better judgement

• Ask your body

• Assemble some of the elements in a group and treat the group

• Back up a few steps. What else could you have done?

• Balance the consistency principle with the inconsistency principle

• Be dirty

• Be extravagant

• Be less critical more often

• Breathe more deeply

• Bridges -build -burn

• Call your mother and ask her what to do.

• Cascades

• Change ambiguities to specifics

• Change instrument roles

• Change nothing and continue with immaculate consistency

• Change specifics to ambiguities

• Children’s voices -speaking -singing

• Cluster analysis

• Consider different fading systems

• Consider transitions

• Consult other sources -promising -unpromising

• Convert a melodic element into a rhythmic element

• Courage!

• Cut a vital connection

• Decorate, decorate

• Define an area as `safe’ and use it as an anchor

• Describe the landscape in which this belongs. (9 August)

• Destroy nothing; Destroy the most important thing

• Discard an axiom

• Disciplined self-indulgence

• Disconnect from desire

• Discover the recipes you are using and abandon them

• Discover your formulas and abandon them

• Display your talent

• Distorting time

• Do nothing for as long as possible

• Do something boring

• Do something sudden, destructive and unpredictable

• Do the last thing first

• Do the washing up

• Do the words need changing?

• Do we need holes?

• Don’t avoid what is easy

• Don’t be afraid of things because they’re easy to do

• Don’t be frightened of cliches

• Don’t be frightened to display your talents

• Don’t break the silence

• Don’t stress one thing more than another

• Emphasize differences

• Emphasize repetitions

• Emphasize the flaws

• Faced with a choice, do both

• Feed the recording back out of the medium

• Feedback recordings into an acoustic situation

• Fill every beat with something

• Find a safe part and use it as an anchor

• First work alone, then work in unusual pairs.

• From nothing to more than nothing

• Get your neck massaged

• Ghost echoes

• Give the game away

• Give way to your worst impulse

• Go outside. Shut the door.

• Go slowly all the way round the outside

• Go to an extreme, move back to a more comfortable place

• How would someone else do it?

• How would you explain this to your parents?

• How would you have done it?

• Humanize something that is free of error.

• Idiot glee (?)

• Imagine the music as a moving chain or caterpillar

• Imagine the music as a series of disconnected events

• In total darkness, or in a very large room, very quietly

• Infinitesimal gradations

• Instead of changing the thing, change the world around it.

• Intentions -credibility of -nobility of -humility of

• Into the impossible

• Is it finished?

• Is something missing?

• Is the intonation correct?

• Is the style right?

• Is the tuning appropriate?

• Is the tuning intonation correct?

• Is there something missing?

• It is quite possible (after all)

• It is simply a matter or work

• Just carry on

• Left channel, right channel, centre channel

• List the qualities it has. List those you’d like.

• Listen in total darkness, or in a very large room, very quietly

• Listen to the quiet voice

• Look at a very small object, look at its centre

• Look at the order in which you do things

• Look closely at the most embarrassing details and amplify.

• Lost in useless territory

• Lowest common denominator check -single beat -single note -single riff

• Magnify the most difficult details

• Make a blank valuable by putting it in an excquisite frame

• Make a sudden, destructive unpredictable action; incorporate

• Make an exhaustive list of everything you might do and do the last thing on the list

• Make it more sensual

• Make what’s perfect more human

• Mechanize something idiosyncratic

• Move towards the unimportant

• Mute and continue

• Not building a wall but making a brick

• Once the search has begun, something will be found

• Only a part, not the whole

• Only one element of each kind

• Overtly resist change

• Pae White’s non-blank graphic metacard

• Pay attention to distractions

• Picture of a man spotlighted

• Put in earplugs

• Question the heroic approach

• Remember those quiet evenings

• Remove a restriction

• Remove ambiguities and convert to specifics

• Remove specifics and convert to ambiguities

• Remove the middle, extend the edges

• Repetition is a form of change

• Retrace your steps

• Revaluation (a warm feeling)

• Reverse

• Short circuit (example; a man eating peas with the idea that they will improve his virility shovels them straight into his lap)

• Shut the door and listen from outside

• Simple subtraction

• Simply a matter of work

• Slow preparation, fast execution

• Spectrum analysis

• State the problem in words as simply as possible

• Steal a solution.

• Take a break

• Take away as much mystery as possible. What is left?

• Take away the elements in order of apparent non-importance

• Take away the important parts

• Tape your mouth

• The inconsistency principle

• The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten

• The tape is now the music

• Think - inside the work -outside the work

• Think of the radio

• Tidy up

• Towards the insignificant

• Trust in the you of now

• Try faking it

• Turn it upside down

• Twist the spine

• Use “unqualified” people.

• Use an old idea

• Use an unacceptable color

• Use cliches

• Use fewer notes

• Use filters

• Use something nearby as a model

• Use your own ideas

• Voice your suspicions

• Water

• What are the sections sections of? Imagine a caterpillar moving

• What context would look right?

• What do you do? Now, what do you do best?

• What else is this like?

• What is the reality of the situation?

• What is the simplest solution?

• What mistakes did you make last time?

• What most recently impressed you? How is it similar? What can you learn from it? What could you take from it?

• What to increase? What to reduce? What to maintain?

• What were the branch points in the evolution of this entity

• What were you really thinking about just now? Incorporate

• What would make this really successful?

• What would your closest friend do?

• What wouldn’t you do?

• When is it for? Who is it for?

• Where is the edge?

• Which parts can be grouped?

• Who would make this really successful?

• Work at a different speed

• Would anyone want it?

• You are an engineer

• You can only make one dot at a time

• You don’t have to be ashamed of using your own ideas

• Your mistake was a hidden intention

Links:

[1] Oblique Strategies (Wikipedia)

[2] Nice quote about perspective by Alan Kay

[3] oblicard.com