Innovators need a dependable process that gives them the freedom to be creative and the possibility of being duplicated. If I do something cool once, I definitely want to know how to do it again. By applying some carefully crafted constraints on the creative process we can free ourselves from the pressure of having to create something from nothing and give ourselves the head space to focus on the details of the concept. The goal of this process is to create a new form that the innovator can trust and reuse. Trust in the form frees the innovator to focus on the details of the concept. Reuse of the form allows her to master it.
Before discussing how to create a new form with constraints, let’s look at a couple musical forms and what some artists were able to achieve with them. For a man who only lived to age 35, Mozart wrote quite a few symphonies. 41 to be exact. That’s more than 4 times the amount of symphonies that Beethoven wrote, and Beethoven lived 20 years longer than Mozart. We won’t get into how Beethoven’s deafness may have affected his output, but suffice it to say that Mozart was very prolific compared to many other composers.
Think about what a symphony is. A symphony is a form consisting of four parts, known as movements, with each part having a form of its own with certain predefined properties. These parts are some of the constraints of the form. Because Mozart decided to work in symphony form, he didn’t need to worry much about whether the first movement would be faster than the second, or what key he’d use after the third movement’s exposition – that was all defined by the symphony’s form. This gave him the cognitive bandwidth to do the special things that only Mozart could do. Mozart mastered the symphony to a point where he was eventually able to smash parts of it and rebuild them to suit his genius, and he wouldn’t have been able to do this had a replicable form not existed in the first place.
Symphonies are big and complex, so let’s look at a more basic form like the blues. So simple in its structure – 12 bars and 3 chords played over and over until the end of the song – it’s so basic that it forces the artist to be creative in order to distinguish himself. Its simplicity also lets the artist focus on what blues really is. Blues is pain and angst, and it’s a great genre for players to showcase their virtuosity. Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan are two obvious examples. Blues artists don’t need to work out details like which chord to play on the 5th bar, because those things are defined by the form. This allows them to focus on the message and how the song will be played. Again, it’s a cognitive bandwidth thing. The constraints of the form – and the trust that artists have in it – made way for unsurpassed creativity.
Before starting your next project, make it fit into a form. Design some contraints around it, and keep it simple, like the blues. The nature of the constraints can vary depending on how much room you want to give yourself to play within the form. Constraints are like hunches. When you start a new project, you should have several hunches about what you want it to be. Don’t fight them, as they are based on instinct. Capture them and make a form out of them. Once you’ve set the constraints, thereby creating your new form, every decision you make about the project going forward should fit support them.
Here’s an example of how I use constraints. I recently created a clock for the iPad. When I started the project, I didn’t know that I’d be making a clock at all. I set three broad constraints: 1) a screen-based project that must scale to any size, 2) something that would allow people to interact with it without necessarily knowing they are doing so, 3) something that rewarded users who approached the piece to actively interact with it. This gave me a form, plenty of food for thought, and an important sense of direction.
The form was broad enough that the end product could have manifested itself in many ways, but after chipping away at it, I ended up with a clock with hands that groove in reaction to the sound around it. It can be installed on a screen of any size, which meets the first constraint. It responds to any sound, so people making noise in its vicinity (at an airport, for instance) are using it even if they don’t realize it (constraint #2), and a user who approaches it is rewarded by the clock’s response to his own voice (constraint #3).
A great constraint can be open to interpretation or debate. The second constraint from my clock project – something that would allow people to interact with it without necessarily knowing they are doing so – gave me a lot to think about. It was a major reason why sound became so central to the project. The best thing about this constraint is that it can be met in ways I haven’t even thought about yet, so I can go back to this form later and end up with a completely different product.
Collaboration is more productive by designing the constraints of a project. Constraints will focus the group by establishing some fundamentals. When you ask your group, “What are we going to make?” the answer can be anything under the sun. It’s not very productive. It also gives the group too much responsibility to prepare for collaboration, because the group doesn’t know where or how to start. Forms focus the discussion. Good constraints can be discussed without much preparation.
Learning how to design the constraints will take practice, but you’ll know when it’s working. It’s easy to start doing. I’ve used this approach on countless projects. It works for independent and group projects. You’ll have unique, reusable forms that you can master, and it will make your creative process much more productive. When you master your form, you’ll find great freedom to work within it, and you will find yourself working better.
