BIG Tools is a hands-on toolkit for the BIG Ideas workshop process. It takes an early insight — something you noticed, something that bothers you, something that could be — and walks it through a workflow checklist until you have a hypothesis you can test and a record you can defend.
If you've ever filled a whiteboard with sticky notes and then had no idea what to do with them the next morning, BIG Tools is for you.
What it is
A per-idea Tacit-Context gate plus six surviving tools, organized as a Tracker (the persistence spine) and a workflow checklist:
- Tacit-Context — externalize what you already know about an idea before any AI runs (five questions, ~5 minutes)
- Reframe — five d.school cognitive moves (Focus, Feel, Challenge, Borrow, Flip); you write each, AI offers alternatives
- Mixtape — capture what the idea feels like as a five-track playlist plus liner notes
- Alignment — surface friction across Carl Moore's 4P cascade (Purpose, Products, Performance, Process); you write the verdict
- Collaborate — find arxiv neighbors and authors worth reaching out to; you write the outreach
- Falsification — "Have you considered…" probes against your idea
- Friction-on-Demand — Known Unknowns and Unknown Unknowns probing
- Tracker — the persistence spine; insights, How Might We questions, hypotheses
Each idea passes through the Tacit-Context gate first, then runs through the tools in any order. You mark items done as you go, and the Tracker accumulates a provenance trail across every tool you ran.
Who it's for
Students working through the BIG Ideas workshop — capture what you notice, sharpen it, and walk it through the progression. The tools do the structuring; you do the thinking.
Instructors and workshop hosts running cohorts — give your students a shared toolkit and vocabulary, and watch how ideas evolve across the cohort. RTL layout and a Hebrew translation are built in.
Why we built this
The BIG Ideas process is powerful because it moves you from "I noticed something" to "here's what we're shipping" — but the steps in between are the hard part. BIG Tools exists so that each step has a clear shape: an input, a prompt, a small set of candidates, and a decision about what to carry forward.
You don't have to remember what stage you're on or how to phrase a How-Might-We question. The tool holds the structure so you can spend your attention on the idea.
Getting started
- Sign in at bigtools.dev
- Open BIG Tools from the sidebar
- Drop in an idea — a sentence, a paragraph, whatever you've got
- Fill the Tacit-Context gate to externalize what you already know
- Run the tools in any order — Reframe, Mixtape, Alignment, Collaborate, Falsification, Friction-on-Demand
- The Tracker accumulates the trail; export when you're ready to share
BIG Tools is free during the student beta. If you're running a workshop and want to onboard a cohort, get in touch — we'll help you get set up.