Dojo · Twelve corners
Think around the corner.
Not trivia. Named heuristics. Commit a move, then read why the others lose. 0/12 corners found.
01 · Mindset · Grain
The building is not on your team
University hall, Saturday 11:00. Two thousand people. The venue Wi‑Fi is a rumour with a password. Your product currently loads models from the public internet. Judging is Sunday 16:00, on a stage, with a projector you have not seen.
4 min
02 · Mindset · Corner
The bins were never the problem
A university wants to cut dining-hall waste. The brochure says 'sustainability, students, data'. Eighty teams will put sensors on bins. A cook tells you, offhand, that at 20:40 they throw whole trays because students will not take leftovers in front of their friends.
5 min
03 · Arena · Room
The rubric is a brochure
Scoring: 25% technology, 25% design, 25% impact, 25% pitch. It is Sunday 16:40. The panel has seen eleven teams. Three used a large language model 'to reimagine'. One judge is a PM. One is an engineer. One is the sponsor's VP.
4 min
04 · Arena · Hostile
This already exists
Ninety seconds into your demo a judge says, not unkindly, 'this already exists — it's just Notion / a spreadsheet / that startup from last year'. Your teammate starts to list features. The clock is still running.
4 min
05 · Arena · Knife
Three chairs for the night nurse
Brief: 'improve hospital shift handover'. You have 36 hours, two developers, no clinician on the team. A night nurse you messaged said she is scared of missing last insulin and overnight allergies. Keep three. Kill the rest.
6 min
06 · Arena · Time
Spend the 36 hours
Friday 18:00 to Sunday 18:00. Team of three. A decent adjacent idea. You must rank four schedules from most likely to win the room to most likely to donate the prize.
5 min
07 · Arena · Sponsor
The VP's real prize
The brief requires 'use the Acme API'. The API is janky: twelve endpoints, three of them work, docs written by someone who left. Acme's VP is on the panel. Their public KPI this quarter is 'developers finally understand us'.
4 min
08 · Mindset · Flip
No designer, eight hours
You are one developer. There is no designer. Judging is in eight hours. The intern has offered a full design system, onboarding, and a marketing landing page.
4 min
09 · Adversary · Slop
Which lines have a body
Five taglines for a handover tool. Two were written after a shift. Three are intern-weather. Select every slop line. Leave the ones a body could have said.
5 min
10 · Adversary · Tells
The intern's architecture
Your intern (a model) has proposed the stack for a three-line handover card. Select every fatal tell — the choices that are importance-signalling rather than payment of the constraint.
5 min
11 · Adversary · Field
The climate kill zone
Prompt: 'build something for the climate'. You asked the intern for ten ideas. Eight were carbon trackers, offset marketplaces, or 'AI for energy optimisation'. Two were odd.
4 min
12 · Arena · Residue
The still frame
You have four minutes to pick the image a judge will reverse-remember at 17:10. Your product is the three-line night-nurse card.
4 min