My wife wanted us to take the kids on vacation. I wanted her to tell me where. This seemed like a reasonable division of labor, provided I didn’t think too hard about her half.
She couldn’t tell me what she wanted because she didn’t know what the possibilities were. Finding out would require research. She didn’t want to do that either.
So there we were: two adults, a potential family vacation, and nobody volunteering to open the first tab.
I could see the problem with my approach. I was asking her to have a preference before she had anything to prefer. But I still didn’t want to plan a vacation.
Building an interactive website, apparently, was fine.
I had AI research nearby possibilities. That gave it the part neither of us wanted: finding places and working out what a trip to each might look like. Then I made the results into a website where she could browse and pick what appealed to her.
This is an elaborate way to arrive at a fairly ordinary question: do any of these look good?
But it was a question she could answer. A blank request for a vacation idea asks you to invent the options and choose among them. A few possible trips give you something to like. Or dislike. Disliking something is also progress when the alternative is having no idea at all.
The site had photographs, activity descriptions, and ideas for how the days could go. Enough to picture being there with the kids, instead of trying to develop an opinion about a place name. Activities had Want and Skip buttons. She didn’t have to produce a competing itinerary to object to part of mine.
Once she could see the possibilities, she picked what she liked, and we refined it together. We had a direction. A proposed trip could change; it didn’t have to win approval in one immaculate first draft.
That was the useful part of the whole exercise. She hadn’t been withholding a vacation preference that I could extract by asking again. She needed something to react to. I needed her reactions to know what to develop.
We got to that part together. I just had to build a website before I was willing to participate in vacation planning.