Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies
from "A Year with Swollen Appendices"
by Brian Eno | ISBN: 0571179959
"The Oblique Strategies are a series of cards - about the size of playing-cards - to be used in creative and problem-solving situations. They come in a black box. Each card carries a single phrase or sentence: the first was "Honour thy error as a hidden intention." The original set was assembled by the painter Peter Schmidt and myself, and arose out of observations of our working processes."
"The purpose of the cards is to try to derail normal thinking habits when they've proven ineffective, and to suggest new ways of approaching problems. The original box, which we published in 1975, contained 113 cards, but since then some have been omitted and new ones have been added."
"Peter Schmidt died in early 1980, and since then I've been the curator of the Oblique Strategies. They have been published three times in English, and also in French and Japanese. They have also been produced as a floppy disc. No two releases are exactly identical - cards come and go."
A Different Way of Thinking
I am a long-time fan of Brian Eno. The first time that I heard his 1978 release Music for Airports (mp3 sample 
), I was hooked for life.
Many Eno fans have heard about the small deck of cards containing creative ways to look at the various conundrums we face day to day. Called "Oblique Strategies", the original deck of cards was created as a way for the artist to work under a specific set of principles. If you're working on an issue, creative or otherwise, stop what you're doing and draw a card from the deck. Then consider the statement on the card and try to apply it to your particular situation. In terms of web site design, a simple statement like "Be extravagant" can unlock that burst of inspiration missing from the equation.
Gregory Taylor has a great web site about the Oblique Strategies, and he has this to say about the strategies:
The deck itself had its origins in the discovery by Brian Eno that both he and his friend Peter Schmidt (a British painter whose works grace the cover of "Evening Star" and whose watercolours decorated the back LP cover of Eno's "Before and After Science" and also appeared as full-size prints in a small number of the original releases) tended to keep a set of basic working principles which guided them through the kinds of moments of pressure - either working through a heavy painting session or watching the clock tick while you're running up a big buck studio bill. Both Schmidt and Eno realized that the pressures of time tended to steer them away from the ways of thinking they found most productive when the pressure was off. The Strategies were, then, a way to remind themselves of those habits of thinking - to jog the mind.
Over time, multiple editions of the Oblique Strategies have been released, the most recent being the 5th set. Very hard to find, the actual deck of cards is usually best tracked down at eBay or some other such auction site. Google around and maybe you'll be lucky enough to find your very own set.