01
Build Your Requirement Register
You separate the source material into goals, requirements, constraints, preferences, assumptions, and unresolved questions before any ranking begins.
Made for Architects
Turn Your Competing Priorities Into Design Principles
Also useful for: people in Creative
75 min
Advanced
Decisions
Get Something Done
Need to Compare Options
Turn mixed goals, constraints, stakeholder needs, and adjacency concerns into a ranked set of project-specific rules for guiding design decisions.
We'll use them to write your prompt.
Completed ✓
Make Your Play
Give us the situation. We’ll build the prompt.
Stop broad goals such as flexibility, openness, privacy, efficiency, and identity from pulling your design in different directions without a clear way to choose.
Your answers save as you type.
What you'll do
This is the plan inside your prompt. Add your details first. Then follow these steps with ChatGPT or Claude.
02
Group Your Goals Without Flattening Them
You organize related goals into themes while keeping important differences visible.
03
Separate Hard Limits From Negotiable Positions
You check which limits are fixed, which can move, and which haven't been verified.
04
Connect Priorities to People and Places
You link each goal to the stakeholders, spaces, adjacencies, and decisions it affects.
05
Expose the Real Conflicts
You turn vague tension into clear either-or or more-less tradeoffs that your design must address.
06
Draft Directional Principles
You convert the strongest conflicts into project-specific directions that can favor one design move over another.
07
Run Tradeoff Scenarios
You test whether each draft principle still helps when two plausible design moves satisfy different goals.
08
Challenge Weak Evidence
You find principles that depend on assumptions, incomplete input, or an unrepresented voice.
09
Rank What Should Lead the Design
You rank the tested principles by consequence, reach, evidence, and reversibility rather than personal preference.
10
Publish Your Option Test
You turn the ranked principles into a compact tool for concept reviews and decision meetings.
Make Your Play
Turn Your Competing Priorities Into Design Principles
Tell us what the prompt needs to know
Start with the questions below. Each answer personalizes the playbook and builds the prompt you’ll use at the end.
Your situation
Provide the latest brief, meeting notes, program summary, or requirement list.
0/10000
List the outcomes your project is expected to support, including goals that may compete.
0/10000
List the limits your design must respect and note which limits still need confirmation.
0/10000
Summarize what each key stakeholder needs, fears, or considers successful.
0/10000
List important spaces and the relationships that should be close, separate, visible, controlled, or flexible.
0/10000
List the design choices your principles need to guide.
0/10000
Select how well your current requirements have been checked.
Select the phase in which you will use the principles.
This playbook was updated. Review your inputs before copying.
What you'll do
Check a step when you finish it.
01
Build Your Requirement Register
You separate the source material into goals, requirements, constraints, preferences, assumptions, and unresolved questions before any ranking begins.
02
Group Your Goals Without Flattening Them
You organize related goals into themes while keeping important differences visible.
03
Separate Hard Limits From Negotiable Positions
You check which limits are fixed, which can move, and which haven't been verified.
04
Connect Priorities to People and Places
You link each goal to the stakeholders, spaces, adjacencies, and decisions it affects.
05
Expose the Real Conflicts
You turn vague tension into clear either-or or more-less tradeoffs that your design must address.
06
Draft Directional Principles
You convert the strongest conflicts into project-specific directions that can favor one design move over another.
07
Run Tradeoff Scenarios
You test whether each draft principle still helps when two plausible design moves satisfy different goals.
08
Challenge Weak Evidence
You find principles that depend on assumptions, incomplete input, or an unrepresented voice.
09
Rank What Should Lead the Design
You rank the tested principles by consequence, reach, evidence, and reversibility rather than personal preference.
10
Publish Your Option Test
You turn the ranked principles into a compact tool for concept reviews and decision meetings.
Fill in the fields above to generate your prompt preview.
Assembled prompt
Beginner instructions
You can start with rough meeting notes instead of a polished brief. You should keep goals, constraints, and preferences separate, even when your source material mixes them together. Review every proposed principle against your actual project before you use it.
Advanced instructions
You can run the sequence once for the whole project and again for a high-risk zone such as arrival, public-private separation, service circulation, or future expansion. Challenge the final ranking with one cost-driven option and one performance-driven option before you adopt it.
Use this when
You have a crowded or conflicting brief, several voices shaping the project, or design options that satisfy different priorities. You can use this before concept design, during a design reset, or when your team keeps revisiting the same tradeoffs.
You'll need
- Project brief or notes
- Project goals
- Known constraints
- Stakeholder needs
- Spaces and adjacencies
- Open decisions or options
- Evidence status
- Project phase
You'll get
- 4 to 7 ranked principles, and each principle names a real conflict, guides a design choice, states an accepted tradeoff, and includes a test you can apply to options
- Also flagged weak evidence, unresolved questions, and conditions that could change the ranking.
By the end of this playbook
You will have:
- 4 to 7 ranked principles, and each principle names a real conflict, guides a design choice, states an accepted tradeoff, and includes a test you can apply to options
- Also flagged weak evidence, unresolved questions, and conditions that could change the ranking.
Examples
Progress 1 of 10