Documentation

Guides and references for students and instructors

Getting Started

Sign in, start your first progression, and understand what each stage is asking you for.

The Six Tools

What each tool in the progression is doing, what it's good at, and how to recognize when it's not working.

Recipe: Tacit-Context

Five questions about what you already know — written down before any AI tool runs against this idea. Externalizes Unknown Knowns so AI verifies and enhances rather than generating.

Recipe: Reframe

Five d.school moves (Focus, Feel, Challenge, Borrow, Flip) — you write each one; AI offers alternative angles only on demand.

Recipe: Next Great Thing (NGT)

Run N parallel LLM calls with rotating facilitator personas to produce divergent idea candidates — a simulated Nominal Group Technique session.

Recipe: Alignment

Bound an idea against a purpose profile using a 4-stage cascade — AI surfaces friction questions for each stage; you issue the verdict.

Recipe: Collaborate

Find real arxiv papers related to your idea and surface authors worth reaching out to — you write your own outreach.

Recipe: Mixtape

Build a 5-track mixtape that captures what an idea feels like — a curation tool that surfaces the emotional shape of a project.

Recipe: Pitch

Generate three layered pitch outputs — X-for-Y hook, elevator, and channel-shaped draft — for a given audience and format.

Recipe: Falsification

Write your idea — AI surfaces 'Have you considered…' prompts. You decide which are real concerns and which are already handled.

Recipe: Paper House

A deterministic self-check — can you say your idea in one paragraph, under the word budget, with no markdown scaffolding?

Recipe: Friction-on-Demand

Rumsfeld 2×2+1 probing — known unknowns and unknown unknowns specific to your idea. You decide which probes are real.

For Students

How to use BIG Tools inside a workshop — working pace, what to promote, when to re-open a stage, and how to export.

For Instructors

Running a BIG Ideas cohort on BIG Tools — onboarding, pacing, language, and what to watch for across a group.