Creative Constraints Unlock the Best Ideas
Use creative constraints to unlock ideas that are out of this world
Did you know that cordless vacuums were first created to collect samples on the moon? Zero gravity is perhaps the ultimate creative constraint.
How to pick up some of the most exciting dust in the universe when everything just floats out of your hands?
From camera phones to freeze-dried food to scratch-proof lenses, NASA has been the catalyst for many of the creative solutions we use today.
Some 2,300 years before NASA, Plato famously said “necessity is the mother of invention” and given the space industry faces some of the most extreme constraints imaginable, very different necessities emerge.
Camera phones? Space constraints (pun intended) and a need to capture high-fidelity imagery led to the creation of tiny cameras that could later be installed into smartphones.
Freeze-dried food? Weight constraints led teams to explore powdered food solutions.
Scratch-proof lenses? Carbon coating was needed to protect the astronauts’ helmets, because in zero gravity there’s a whole lot of stuff flying around.
The best ideas are cooked up in constrained environments
According to Oguz Acar, Marketing Chair at King’s Business School, King’s College London: “when there are no constraints on the creative process, complacency sets in”. This means people follow “the path-of-least-resistance”, accepting a slower pace and lower standards.
In the spirit of drinking my own Kool-Aid, I introduced extra constraints as I began writing this article.
Armed with just 2 words “creative constraints”, I gave myself ten minutes to come up with a plan and a fresh hook (that’s my jam — you might recognise some of my ideas from behavioural science or entrepreneurship, but you’ll always get a fresh take on them that helps the message hit differently). Once those 10 minutes were up, I left my desk and went to the gym.
And it worked. Within 10 minutes, I’d hit on a concept I was happy to research and write about, and had saved myself a lot of deliberation.
Parkinson’s law states that work expands in the time available, so it follows that life devoid of creative constraints is going to allow projects to wallow in an endless abyss of time, something that many of us want to avoid.
Indeed, Google famously balances creative freedom with constraints. On the one hand, the company provides employees with generous Google 20% time to work on innovation projects and on the other hand, implements strict deadlines for developing prototypes and ambitious product performance requirements, such as high levels of device compatibility or fast download time.
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What kinds of constraints to introduce?
Constraints can be self-imposed, imposed by others in our team or the product of circumstances outside of our control. It’s up to us to shift our perspectives and see them as a source of creative stimulation rather than frustration.
Customer Constraints
Customer constraints are my favourite, because when we’re creating something for someone (whether that’s a paying customer or your personal Instagram following), the constraints are a guiding light leading us to what the customer really wants, rather than a limitation.
When GE set about creating a version of their heart-disease-detecting electrocardiograph (ECG) for the India market, they let the customers create the constraints:
“We realized that the biggest impediment was that we were selling what we were making [rather than] making what the customers here needed,” explained V. Raja, president and CEO of GE Healthcare-South Asia. “It was clear that if we had to grow here we had to shift gears and align our products to the needs of the customers.”
As a result, GE engineers listened to customers and received a challenging brief: the new ECG machine, known as the MAC 400, needed to be battery-operated to deal with power outages and portable and lightweight enough to be transported from village to village.
It had to be easy to service and made from commercially available parts, nothing customised and hard to replace. Most critically, it had to meet the necessary cost requirements to deliver the service to customers at no more than $1 per scan.
These strict guardrails channeled the team’s creativity towards impact, revolutionising healthcare in rural India.
Resource Constraints
The budget the team were given for the creation of the MAC 400? $500,000. Just 9% of the budget it took to develop its predecessor. A lean budget forced the team to consider cheaper alternatives, which was also vital to meet the customer cost constraints.
Time was also constrained for this build: the GE engineers were given just 18 months. It didn’t have to be perfect. The first iteration was put out quickly into the market and used to gather customer feedback. This created the necessary constraints to guide creation of the next generation MAC i at half the price of the MAC 400.
An all-you-can-eat buffet of resources rarely produces the most game-changing innovations relative to its magnitude. There’s a reason a tasting menu restricting itself to food grown in the restaurant’s vegetable garden can create something more impressive.
Having no constraints induces choice paralysis, rather than encouraging us to be smart about what we have.
How to introduce constraints?
Whether you’re posting on social media, writing a book, or designing the next cordless space vacuum, implementing the right constraints is down to knowing what you want to accomplish:
I just want to get it done: time constraints. Schedule tasks with hard, ambitious deadlines (a time you must leave your desk, another meeting you need to go to).
The pomodoro technique, setting a timer and working in 25 minute bursts, is the simplest example of this. But a meeting you can’t move or a promise to send someone your work by a given time can be the nudge we need to create accountability.
I want to do it differently: resource constraints. Working with the same ingredients as everyone else will get you to a similar outcome. What constraints can you set in order to set yourself apart?
For his latest album, electronic artist Croquet Club gave himself the creative constraint of playing every instrument himself without using loops, a process he likened to “crossing the atlantic ocean on a rowing boat. I could take a ferry, I could take a plane, but I promised to challenge myself to see how far I could go.”
I want to add value: customer constraints. Interview your audience or your customers and find out what they want to see or hear from you. How can you help them? Use their needs as the foundation for your constraints.
Famous for his simple illustrations of challenging concepts, PJ Milani understands that most of us best absorb information through visuals, so he constrains himself to using only images, with a strict set of design guidelines.
From zero gravity to self-imposed deadlines, creative constraints can come from anywhere. Sometimes they can feel daunting when they’re first imposed upon us. But as innovators have shown, game-changing solutions can come from rising to the challenge.
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And as a thank you for supporting my work, here’s a Dad Joke.
What’s an astronaut’s favourite chocolate? 🍫
A Mars bar
