Build an Oracle

Design and build a small working oracle of your own — and disclose exactly how it works, rather than let it pass as magic.

Apparatus 03

Due: 8 October 2027 · Weight: 25%

Every divination system studied so far — omens, dreams, astrology, tarot, the I Ching, numerology — has a mechanism, whether or not it advertises one. This assessment asks you to build a small oracle of your own and do the one thing none of those traditions historically did: say exactly how it works, in the same place a user reads its output.

The brief#

Design and build a small working oracle — any medium — that takes a prompt from a user and returns a reading, with its mechanism disclosed plainly alongside the reading itself.

The oracle can be as simple as a card-draw, a random-line generator, or a short structured questionnaire that maps answers to a fixed set of readings — complexity is not what’s being marked. What matters is whether the mechanism disclosure is genuine: a user should be able to find out, without hunting, that a reading was chosen from a fixed pool, computed from simple arithmetic, or generated some other specific way. Dressing up the same disclosure in mystical language defeats the point of the exercise.

What you submit#

The working oracle itself (a page, a small app, a physical prop with an accompanying write-up — whatever medium fits the design), the mechanism disclosure, and a short reflection (300–500 words) on what Workshop 5’s playtesting revealed about the gap between what you built and how someone else read it.