For taking a project of your own from a hunch to something made, whether it runs for a weekend or a whole term. Find what you want to work on, write a brief, choose how to research it, plan the making, and look back at how you worked. Every step hands you a design move to try.
You don't need to know what your project is yet. Spin the wheel for a small making task, do it, and note what stuck. Spin as often as you like, and keep the ones that pull at you.
You don't have to know the answer yet. Each prompt starts with a small task that finds it for you. Whatever you find hands back a move to explore it further, and any of them can become your topic.
Forty positions from the Practice Playground deck, one at a time. Don't analyse them; mark your first reaction and move on. You're not choosing one. You're finding out what you react to.
The kind of designer you are is defined by what you choose to care about, and what you refuse to ignore. It shows in the materials you work through, the people you choose to work with and design for, and the values that guide what you make.
Here are twelve pairs. For each one, tap the side you lean towards today. There's no right answer and no score. It's a snapshot of you at the start of this project, and you'll see it again at the very end, to find out what moved.
Go with your first answer. If you really can't choose, leave the pair blank: a blank is an answer too.
Five parts that work as one system, each shaping the others. Everything you do next should answer to this statement. Once you have it, decisions get quicker, even when things get messy.
Before you go further, set yourself one small task for this week: something you wouldn't normally do, that moves your brief along. You'll bring back what it made, to your next check-in or to whoever you're working with.
Small is the point. If it would take more than an afternoon, cut it in half.
Four short methods, one for each part of your brief. Answer one question for each: your answer chooses the move, and the words from your brief fill it in.
You don't do them here. Write each one up, say when you'll do it and how long you'll give it, and add it to your methods. Print them as cards, go and do them, then come back and write what you found.
Come back here once you've done your methods. Write down only what surprised you; what you expected doesn't need writing down. A method that found nothing surprising still counts, so write that.
You don't need a question to start. Try things quickly and cheaply: change one thing, look, and write down one thing you noticed. Do a few. When one keeps pulling at you, sharpen it into a question further down.
A promising idea only matters if you can make it real. Plan starts with the end: how you'll know it worked, and how you'll know it didn't. Each decision comes with a move that keeps it honest.
The steps you'll take, in order, and what each one needs. Then mark the steps where you could stop and still have something to show. The page reads them back to you as one plan: what to get in place first, and your way home if something fails.
This is a networking exercise as much as a plan. Write down everyone you know who touches your project, even loosely: people you know well, people you know a bit, people you only know of. For each one, ask yourself whether it makes sense to contact them now, later, or not for this project.
First names or initials only, and no phone numbers or emails. What you type stays in this browser and on your printout.
What you can spend, and the day it ends. The parts you mark by hand every week (your time grid, your budget lines, your task list) are on the third page of your summary, ready to print.
Every move acts on something: the material, how the parts are arranged, the setting around the work, the process, the people, or what you notice. Here are the moves you used while discovering and the ones your methods and experiment handed you, sorted by what they act on. The shift between the first two columns is a shift in how you work; the third column shows moves next to yours that you haven't tried.
Moves connect to each other: one leads on to another, or pairs with it, or can stand in for it. These are the ones closest to what you already did, that you haven't tried.
You've made something, and you've seen how your way of working moved. Before the next project, write down what you want to keep. Don't start from a blank: each principle comes with a small task that finds it in what you already did.
The same pairs you answered on the React page. Tap where you lean now. The dashed box is where you were at the start; anything that moved is marked.
A record of your project on four A4 pages: what you spun, your brief and methods; your experiment, with a log to fill in run by run; your plan, with who can help, a time grid, budget and task list to mark by hand; and your weekly notes, the moves you used and the ones to try next. It fills itself as you work through the other steps, so there is nothing to edit here.