Fields

A field is one idea and the space around it. You start with an origin idea — a product, a concept, a sentence, a feeling — and branch it along axes you name, until the shape of the possibilities is something you can look at rather than hold in your head.

It's the part of the work that comes before you know what to ask. Any point in the space can become a study later.

Starting one

New field asks for your origin idea and, optionally, a name. The idea becomes the center of the canvas, and everything branches from it.

If you already have a field exported from Prism, Import brings the whole tree across — axes, directions, pins, colours and images.

Branching

Drag out from the edge of a card. How far you drag sets how many new cards you get, and the direction decides where they land — you'll see dashed placeholders where they're going before you let go.

When you release, Prism asks for the axis: the dimension you want these to vary along. More visceral. For the skeptic. Stripped to essentials. Increasingly absurd. The opposite. That phrase is the whole instruction — the cards that come back are the same idea moved along it.

Select several cards and drag, and every one of them branches along the axis at once, which is how a field goes from a line to a space in one move.

Each card carries its text, the axis it came from, and — once you've clustered — the group it belongs to.

Pictures

Some permutations are easier to judge as an image than a sentence. Prism generates images for the ones that read visually after you branch, and you can ask for one on any card with Generate image.

Grouping what emerged

Once a field has a few branches, Cluster reads what's there and names the groups it finds, writing them across the top of the canvas. Click a group name to fly to it and select everything in it.

The names come from the material rather than from a list you picked in advance — which is the point. What you called two different directions often turns out to be one.

Keeping the good ones

Pin any card worth keeping. Pinned cards carry a filled pin, and every pin across every field collects on the Pins tab — your shortlist, with its axis and its field, so you can compare candidates that came from different explorations.

Unpin from the canvas or the card's own page.

Taking a card further

Open a card and you get its whole page, with three things you can do next:

• Research — a sourced desk-research pass on that idea's problem space. See Desk research.
• Studies — draft a study from this idea. Respondents see the problem space, never the idea itself.
• Create opportunity — send it to Compass as a change worth considering, where it lands in the New lane.

Getting a field out

The File menu exports a field as JSON (the whole tree, re-importable) or CSV. Fields need a desktop-sized screen; there's no canvas on a phone.