Make Strange
Work only from what is in front of you, as if you had never met it; stop when memory creeps back in.
Formerly Defamiliarise
Describe your commute as an alien anthropologist would.
Seen in Leo Tolstoy, Kholstomer, begun 1863, published 1886
Try it on your work
Change one condition of encounter with the thing you're working on: upside down, at ten times the distance, in the dark, in a mirror. Hold the strange encounter for five minutes. Stop when you notice something you have handled a hundred times and never seen.
Describe the most familiar element of your project in ten written lines without using its name or category. Where the description got hard is where familiarity was doing your seeing for you.
Follow your own routine while narrating it as an outside observer would: "the person now checks the same thing a third time." One full routine. The sentences that embarrassed you are the audit.
How it has been used
Make the familiar strange enough to see again: Shklovsky named it; describe your own hallway as a stranger would, hold a word until it dissolves. The move forbids the shortcut of memory: you must work from what's in front of you as if you'd never met it.
Where it leads
Grouped under Help me see it from another angle