Brian Eno and artist Peter Schmidt dreamt up a deck of cards called Oblique Strategies in 1975 . Each card has a cryptic prompt or constraint meant to “break creative blocks” by pushing you into sideways thinking.
What Are Oblique Strategies?
It’s basically a random remix button for ideas. When you’re stuck, you draw a card like a strange fortune cookie. Wikipedia calls it “a card-based method… each card offers a challenging constraint intended to help artists break creative blocks by encouraging lateral thinking” . The instructions are so weird they force your brain to jump tracks – one writer even described them as “elliptical imperatives” that spark creative connections unobtainable through regular modes of work .
Creative Uses & Anecdotes
These cards aren’t just gimmicks – lots of famous artists swear by them. For example, Brian Eno and David Bowie actually drew from the deck while making Heroes. In the studio on “Sense of Doubt,” Bowie’s card said “Emphasize differences” and Eno’s said “Make everything as similar as possible,” so one would diverge while the other converged – a playful creative tug-of-war that became part of the track .
Mostly it’s about having fun with constraints – sometimes just an odd command (like “be dirty”) is what you need to snap out of a creative rut 😆.
Sources: As Wikipedia notes, Oblique Strategies is a deck of 7×9 cm cards of “worthwhile dilemmas” co-created by Eno and Schmidt (1975), each offering a cryptic instruction to break creative blocks . These cards illustrate how a weird prompt or two can rescue you from creative paralysis.
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