Creativity Series
Designing Constraints to Overcome Your Creativity Block
How to use constraints as a springboard in the ideation process
“Now, I would like you all to dance like ceiling fans that spin their blades in the summer!’ said the dance teacher instructing the group of new students who had just signed up for dance school.
This was in 2003, and I was having a break between lessons at this art school, part of the degree program I was enrolled in, when I overheard this instruction from the dance instructor.
Curious about what moves the students would come up with, I snuck into the studio, expecting to see the dancers moving like mechanical desk fans. To my surprise, the moves were graceful and how the dancers expressed themselves went beyond what I had imagined possible.
Little did I know, this method is often used in dance where instructors limit the options of what dancers can do. Depending on the purpose of the dance practice, this kind of artificial constraint helps to spark creativity in the moves. Contrastingly, fallback moves are moves that dancers can execute well, no matter the circumstance. However, as professional dancer FraGue Moser-Kindler says, ‘If those are too predominant in our freestyle, we give ourselves the constraint of not using them at all.’
Examples of common deliberate constraints in dance are not to use specific parts of your body, only moves while standing up, or requiring that hands and feet must always touch the floor.
Art has always been my favourite subject because I feel it allows one to express themselves freely and creatively without constraint. However, after seeing how the dancers responded to their instructor’s instruction, I had the epiphany that constraint does not limit one’s creativity but rather creativity can thrive under it.
And that is where I began to explore different types of constraints. In some cases, designing a perimeter to overcome a creative block and unleash potential creativity.
A dot on the white paper
Many people find starting a new painting on a blank canvas to be quite intimidating. They stare at the blank canvas for hours, without having a clue where to begin.
A friend, who is an art teacher, shared how she overcame this problem in her students who were stuck at the start line. She would have the student splash a random blob on the canvas and advise them to take a step back to look at the canvas. The blob they created would spark a starting point to their work.
In fact, this is often seen in street art where artists leverage everyday objects as an inspiration source rather than a constraint.
Connecting to random dots
If you find yourself struggling with generating creative solutions for your design problems, you can try this exercise that helps you to think out-of-the-box by creating a perimeter. The approach is simple and the only tools you need are a dictionary book or an online random noun generator.
Separate the paper into three columns. The first column lists the problem you would like to solve, while the second column lists random words generated for you through the random noun generator. The third column lists ideas that you have thought of, based on the relation between the problem and the random words.
For example, if your brief is to design an energy-saving car, flip open a dictionary and point to a word. If your finger landed on the word ‘parachute’, think of ideas that connect ‘parachute’ to ‘energy-saving car’. Perhaps you could install a parachute on the car that serves as a solar panel or use the parachute to lift the car like a sailing boat. The ideas can be ridiculous and wild, but it serves as a springboard that helps you to view the problem from a different perspective, quite often taken for granted due to impracticability.
When words become a barrier to creativity
Although random words can serve as a good connector in brainstorming activities, it could also limit our creativity when finding solutions, as highlighted by Jonathan Ive, who was a Chief Design Officer at Apple.
A few years ago, Jonathan Ive made an appearance on Blue Peter, a children’s program. The host asked him, ‘The challenge was to design a lunchbox, school bag, and a pencil case all in one. So imagine that was your brief. If you were given that task, how would you approach it?
Jonathan Ive’s immediate response: ‘If we are thinking of a lunchbox, we would be really careful about not having a word box [and] already give you a bunch of ideas that could be quite narrow because you think of a box as being square and like a cube. We are quite careful with the words we use because those can sort of determining the path that you go down.’
His reply on how words could potentially limit one’s creativity caught my attention. The choice of words when setting a perimeter for a brief or problem statement can cause a person to visualise the solution based on the word prompt, which in turn unintentionally restricts the ideation process.
Using constraints as a tool
My experience in seeing how the dance instructor used constraints to guide the dancers to express themselves imaginatively has revealed to me that we all have the capacity to think and work creatively.
People will often tell me they are not ‘creative’ or are not able to ‘think outside of the box’.
What they have not yet realised is that the box they are fearful of — the boundaries they have constrained themselves inside — that same box of constraints can be used as a pedestal to stand on, to view the situation from higher ground and devise a better solution with all the possibilities they have not yet thought of.
‘It’s not about thinking outside of the box. It’s about realizing there is no box.’
— Jari Askins
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