Reveal
Rearrange what is already there and add nothing; once it is revealed, leave it uncovered.
The detective's ending: no new facts, only the arrangement.
Seen in Piano + Rogers, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1977
Try it on your work
Open one thing that normally works closed (a casing, a folder, a finished surface) and leave its workings visible while it operates or is used, for one full use. What the visibility changed in the user is the finding.
State plainly, to someone involved, one true thing about the project that everyone works around: kindly, once, without softening it into nothing. Record the first thing that happens next.
Publish, at least to yourself, the actual criteria by which one recurring decision gets made, not the official ones. Once they're written and legible, decide whether they survive being seen.
How it has been used
Disclose what was hidden in plain sight: the magician's exposed method, the building with its pipes on the outside, the visible seams. The move forces you to leave the revealed thing revealed: covering it back up when it embarrasses you is the opposite operation.
Where it leads
Grouped under Show me what I’m missing