# Volume Generation

Three traditions for producing many ideas fast:
- **Crazy 8s** — Google Ventures Sprint method. Codified in *Sprint* (Knapp et al., 2016).
- **Brainwriting 6-3-5** — Bernd Rohrbach, 1968. German design-method literature.
- **James Webb Young** — *A Technique for Producing Ideas* (1940). 60-page book; canonical advertising-copywriter manual.

## When to use

- Time pressure with a generative goal
- Group ideation (brainwriting reliably outperforms verbal brainstorming)
- Quantity-before-quality phase
- You need to produce many to find the few good ones

## Don't use when

- You don't have material yet (Young's stage 1: gather first)
- The right answer is rare and you'll know it when you see it (volume can paradoxically miss it)
- Solo with no time pressure (use deliberative methods instead)

## Crazy 8s

1. Fold a sheet into 8 panels (or use a printed grid).
2. Set a timer for **8 minutes**.
3. Sketch one idea per panel — eight ideas, one minute each.
4. Sketch, don't write. Visual format forces concretization.
5. After timer: pick 1–3 strongest panels.
6. Group share.

The first 4–5 panels are usually slop; the last 3–4 are where surprises live (the easy ideas have been exhausted).

## Brainwriting 6-3-5

Outperforms verbal brainstorming consistently in academic creativity research (Diehl & Stroebe, 1987 + many replications). Verbal brainstorming has well-documented production blocking, evaluation apprehension, and social loafing. Brainwriting eliminates all three.

1. **6 participants**, each with a sheet.
2. Each writes **3 ideas** in **5 minutes**, in a row at the top.
3. Papers rotate. Each participant now sees the previous 3 ideas; writes 3 *new* ones — building or fresh.
4. Repeat until each sheet has been seen by all 6.
5. Result: 6 × 6 × 3 = 108 ideas in 30 minutes.

## James Webb Young — 5 stages

Honest about the *temporal* structure of idea formation. Most methods assume ideas come on demand; Young's account is that they often don't, and the work is upstream.

1. **Gather material.** Specific *and* general material. Most idea-generators fail here. *"Just one more idea about the product, just one more bit of factual material — many a time these have made all the difference."*
2. **Mentally digest.** Turn the material over. Make tentative partial connections. Don't reach for a final idea.
3. **Drop it.** Stop working. Sleep, walk, watch a movie. The unconscious works on it.
4. **The idea arrives.** Often during a shower or walk. *"It will come to you when you are least expecting it."*
5. **Shape and develop.** The arriving idea is half-formed. Subject it to actual scrutiny.

The drop stage is non-negotiable. Compressing it back into 1→2→4 produces incomplete ideas.

## When to use which

| Time available | Group size | Use |
|---|---|---|
| 8 minutes | Solo | Crazy 8s |
| 8 minutes | Group | Crazy 8s + share |
| 30 minutes | Solo | Crazy 8s + 22 min elaboration |
| 30 minutes | Group of 4–8 | Brainwriting 6-3-5 |
| 1 hour | Group | Brainwriting + 30 min affinity diagram |
| 1 day | Solo | Young stages 1–3 |
| 1 week | Solo or small group | Full Young 5 stages |

## Anti-slop notes

- **Volume of equal quality is not volume.** Eight panels of identical structure is one idea drawn eight times. Force divergence by applying different generative methods to different panels.
- Don't pad to round numbers. If only 5 of the 8 panels produced anything, surface 5.
- Surface 1–3 to the user, not all 8 / all 108.
- Don't conflate volume with depth. Volume is breadth-first; depth comes later with elaboration methods.
- Respect Young's drop stage. Rushing from gather → idea in one session usually fails.

Sources: Young, *A Technique for Producing Ideas* (Advertising Publications, 1940); Rohrbach, "Methode 635" (*Absatzwirtschaft* 12, 1968); Knapp et al., *Sprint* (Simon & Schuster, 2016).