Oblique Strategies ((Over one hundred worthwhile dilemmas))

Here's the downloadable widgit of the deck for your laptops Oblique Strategies card decks that Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt invented. It features the complete sets of the Original (1975), the Second (1978) and Third (1979) Editions, as well as the elusive, commercially not-available Fourth set (1996) by Brian Eno and Peter Norton. Selection of the Editions is user-controllable via a preferences panel. The timing for the Auto-Flipback feature is accessible via the preferences panel as well.

Each card contains a phrase or cryptic remark which can be used to break a deadlock or dilemma situation. From the introduction to the 2001 edition: These cards evolved from our separate observations on the principles underlying what we were doing. Sometimes they were recognized in retrospect (intellect catching up with intuition), sometimes they were identified as they were happening, sometimes they were formulated. They can be used as a pack (a set of possibilities being continuously reviewed in the mind) or by drawing a single card from the shuffled pack when a dilemma occurs in a working situation. In this case,the card is trusted even if its appropriateness is quite unclear. They are not final, as new ideas will present themselves, and others will become self-evident.

Here's more info on the Oblique Strategies...

An unofficial, yet thorough website complete with an online version of the deck in case you don't want to load the widget onto your machine.

Here's a link to an online version of the deck.

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More from Eno on the strategies...


The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation - particularly in studios - tended to make me quickly forget that there were others ways of working and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach. If you're in a panic, you tend to take the head-on approach because it seems to be the one that's going to yield the best results Of course, that often isn't the case - it's just the most obvious and - apparently - reliable method. The function of the Oblique Strategies was, initially, to serve as a series of prompts which said, "Don't forget that you could adopt *this* attitude," or "Don't forget you could adopt *that* attitude."


The first Oblique Strategy said "Honour thy error as a hidden intention." And, in fact, Peter's first Oblique Strategy - done quite independently and before either of us had become conscious that the other was doing that - was ...I think it was "Was it really a mistake?" which was, of course, much the same kind of message. Well, I collected about fifteen or twenty of these and then I put them onto cards. At the same time, Peter had been keeping a little book of messages to himself as regards painting, and he'd kept those in a notebook. We were both very surprised to find the other not only using a similar system but also many of the messages being absolutely overlapping, you know...there was a complete correspondence between the messages. So subsequently we decided to try to work out a way of making that available to other people, which we did; we published them as a pack of cards, and they're now used by quite a lot of different people, I think. 


- Brian Eno, interview with Charles Amirkhanian, KPFA-FM Berkeley, 2/1/80