Optional just-in-time boosts.
Boosts are short activities a team can use mid-session: understand a user better, generate ideas faster, test an interaction, or sharpen what you found. Some use AI. Others use the people in the room. Teams pick two or three per phase, and no team has to use any.
Why both kinds exist
AI and humans are good at different things. AI is fast at synthesis, structure, and generating options nobody asked for. Humans are better at authenticity, reading a room, feeling when something is awkward, and knowing what happened in their own building. The teams that do well use both on purpose.
How they're used in a session
Each phase opens with the team deciding what it thinks. Only then do boosts come out. AI boosts arrive as ready-to-paste prompts with the team's own words already filled in. Human boosts are short activities to run at the table: a timer, some paper, and honest conversation.
AI Boosts
Prompts that turn a general-purpose model into a specific collaborator: interviewer, critic, coach, architect.
- Ready to paste into Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini
- Across the Designer, Builder and Advocate phases
- Available in English, Spanish, French and Arabic
- Each one names what it's good for, and where it can mislead you
Human Boosts
Short activities that use what only the people in the room can do: tell a true story, feel the awkward pause, push back honestly.
- Step-by-step facilitation instructions
- Across the Designer, Builder and Advocate phases
- No AI required: paper, a timer, and each other
- Facilitator tips for running each one well
These pages show three boosts per role. Got a code from us? Enter it for the full library.
Proposed additions, August 2026
Twenty-four draft boosts written against what's newly possible with AI (one-shot working prototypes, deep research with citations, voice, agents, video), plus eight human boosts that matter more as the AI side gets stronger. Nothing here is in the live libraries. Rationale and open questions are in docs/boost-bank-2026.md.
Boosts are optional.
If you're deciding whether to run a lab, start with the run of show. The boosts make more sense once you can see where they fit.