Constraints
The minimum condition
You can almost tell which software they were designed in
One brick
To abandon control
Constrained by the medium
The fountainhead of beauty
Freedomless freedom
Hand and brain design
The 1916 Zoning Resolution
Autonomous constraints
When Movable Type ate the blogosphere
Any imaginable shape
A normal wooden pencil
Every exit is an entrance somewhere
When design gets too easy
Design has invariably exhibited styles because some clear limitations on freedom of choice are psychologically necessary to nearly all designers. When design gets too easy it becomes difficult.
Changing constraints
The Constraints Keep Changing
The explicit listing of known constraints in the design program helps here. The designer can periodically scan the list, asking, âCan this constraint now be removed because the world has changed? Can it be entirely circumvented by working outside the design space?â
The momentum of making
Limitations narrow a big process into a smaller, more understandable space to explore. Itâs the difference between swimming in a pool and being dropped off in the middle of the ocean with no land in sight. Those limitations also become the basis for the crucial first steps in improvisation. After those, the momentum of making accelerates as ideas are quickly generated without judgment.
Necessity
Loos's need to respond positively to the difficulties he encountered appeared in the errors that occurred during the construction of the Villa Moller. When the foundations were not laid as specified, he could not afford to dig them up and start again; instead, Loos thickened the form of one side wall to accommodate the mistake, making the thickened wall and emphatic side frame for the front. The formally pure properties of Villa Moller were achieved by working with many similar mistakes and impediments Loos had to take as facts on the ground; necessity stimulated his sense of form. Wittgenstein, knowing no financial necessity, had no such creative dialogue between form and error.
âDesignâ is now âProductâ
An Article by Dorian TaylorDesign has very little to do with what tools or methodologies you use, or what your job title is, or what you have a degree in, or even anything like âcreativityâ; design is about your relationship to constraints. Rather: to what extent are you defining constraints rather than just obeying them? Design is about taking a universe of possibilities and converging onto exactly one outcome. Being handed a set of constraints which you treat like immutable laws of physics (because many of them are) and solving within that envelope is what engineering is. To wit: what most designers are doing most of the time is actually a form of engineering, and engineers are always doing at least some design.
This is because genuine designâthe power to define constraintsâis a privileged political position within an organization, and not everybody can occupy it. In other words, the âseat at the tableâ comes first. Design is Steve Jobs infamously dropping an iPod prototype into his fish tank, pointing at the bubbles coming out and yelling at his staff to make it thinner. It doesnât matter what your title is; Jobs is the designer in that scenario.
- ââSteve Jobsââ
Delight is constraints, joyfully embraced
An Article by Craig ModAnd what is delight? For me, delight is born from a toolâs intuitiveness. Things just working without much thought or fiddling. Delight is a simple menu system you almost never have to use. Delight is a well-balanced weight on the shoulder, in the hand. Delight is the just-right tension on the aperture ring between stops. Delight is a single battery lasting all day. Delight is being able to knock out a 10,000 iso image and know it'll be usable. Delight is extracting gorgeous details from the cloak of shadows. Delight is firing off a number of shots without having to wait for the buffer to catch up. Delight is constraints, joyfully embraced.
The Design Diagram
An Idea by Charles Eames & Ray EamesThis Eames drawing, often referred to as the Design Diagram, was created for a 1969 exhibition at the Louvre entitled, What is Design? Charles and Ray mailed it to the exhibition curator to augment their answers to a series of questions she had posed.
Recognizing Constraints
An Article by Jeremy WagnerSuper Nintendo games were the flavor of the decade when I was younger, and thereâs no better example of building incredible things within comparably meager constraints. Developers on SNES titles were limited to, among other things:
- 16-bit color.
- 8 channel stereo output.
- Cartridges with storage capacities measured in megabits, not megabytes.
- Limited 3D rendering capabilities on select titles which embedded a special chip in the cartridge.
Despite these constraints, game developers cranked out incredible and memorable titles that will endure beyond our lifetimes. Yet, the constraints SNES developers faced were static. You had a single platform with a single set of capabilities. If you could stay within those capabilities and maximize their potential, your game could be playedâand adoredâby anyone with an SNES console.
PC games, on the other hand, had to be developed within a more flexible set of constraints. I remember one of my first PC games had its range of system requirements displayed on the side of the box:
- Have at least a 386 processorâbut Pentium is preferred.
- Ad Lib or PC speaker supportedâbut Sound Blaster is best.
- Show up to the party with at least 4 megabytes of RAMâbut more is better.
Embracing design constraints
An Article by Adrian RoselliConstraints have been shown to generally improve innovation. Giving targets and parameters helps ensure a team is working in unison. Identifying what is out of bounds can further focus that team.
The Microsoft Sound
AÂ Quote by Brian EnoThe thing from the agency said, "We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah- blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional," this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said "and it must be 3 1/4 seconds long."
I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It's like making a tiny little jewel.
In fact, I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I'd finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.
Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview
- ââOn Valueââ
- ââOn Businessââ
- ââOn Programmingââ
- ââOn Successââ
- ââOn Processââ
On Value
It was clear that [Hewlett-Packard] recognized that its true value was in its employees.
On Business
How do you learn to run a company at 21 with no business experience?
Throughout the years in business I found something, which is, Iâd always ask why you do things, and the answers you invariably get are âoh thatâs just the way itâs done.â Nobody knows why they do what they do, nobody thinks about things very deeply in business. Thatâs what I found.
Iâll give you an example. When we were building our Apple Is in the garage we knew exactly what they cost. When we got into a factory in the Apple II days, accounting had this notion of a âstandard cost.â Where youâd kind of set a standard cost and then at the end of the quarter youâd adjust it with a variance. And I kept asking, âwhy do we do this?â And the answer was just âwell thatâs the way itâs done.â And after about 6 months of digging into this what I realized was the reason you do it is because you donât really have good enough controls to know how much it costs, so you guess, and then you fix your guess at the end of the quarter. And the reason you donât know how much it costs is because your information systems arenât good enough.
But nobody said it that way. And so later on when we designed this automated factory for Macintosh we were able to get rid of a lot of these antiquated concepts, and know exactly what something costs, to the cent. And so in business a lot of things are what I would call âfolklore.â Theyâre done that way because they were done that way yesterday. And so if youâre willing to ask a lot of questions about things and work hard you can learn business pretty fast. Itâs not the hardest thing in the world. Itâs not rocket science.
On Programming
I think everyone in this country should learn a computer language because it teaches you how to think. Itâs like going to law school â I donât think anyone should be a lawyer, but going to law school could be useful because it teaches you how to think in a certain way. So I view computer science as a liberal art.
On Success
The technology crashed and burned at Xerox.
What happens is, like with John Sculley, John came from PepsiCo, and they at most would change their product maybe once every ten years. To them a new product was like a new size bottle. So if you were a product person you couldnât change the course of that company very much. So who influenced the success of PepsiCo? The sales and marketing people. Therefore they were the ones that got promoted and they were the ones that ran the company.
Well, for PepsiCo that might have been ok, but it turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM and Xerox.
If you were a product person at IBM, or Xerox, so you make a better copier or a better computer? So what? When you have a monopoly market share, the company isnât any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people end up getting driven out of the decision marking forums. And the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibilities and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product vs. a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship thatâs required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers.
So thatâs what happened at Xerox.
On Process
People get confused, companies get confused. When they start getting bigger, they want to replicate their initial success, and a lot of them think that somehow thereâs some magic in the process that theyâve created. And so they start to institutionalize process across the company. And before very long people get very confused that the process is the content.
In my career Iâve found that the best people are the ones who really understand the content. And theyâre a pain in the butt to manage. But you put up with it because theyâre so great at the content. And thatâs what makes great products. Itâs not process, itâs content.
On Greatness
Whatâs important to you in the development of a product?
One of the things that really hurt Apple was that after I left John Sculley got a very serious disease. And that disease â Iâve seen other people get it too â itâs the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work, and if you just tell all these other people âhereâs this great idea,â then of course they can just go off and make it happen.
The problem with that is that thereâs just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts, because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it, and you also find there are tremendous tradeoffs you have to make, there are just certain things you canât make electrons do, there are certain things you canât make plastic, or glass, or factories, or robots do. And as you get into all these things, you find that designing a product is keeping 5,000 things in your brain, these concepts, and just fitting them all together and continuing to push to fit them together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover a new problem or a new opportunity to do it a little differently. And itâs that process that is the magic.
On Teamwork
What Iâve always felt that a team of people doing something they really believe in is like, is like when I was a young kid, there was a widowed man that lived up the street. He was in his 80âs, and a little scary looking, and I got to know him a little bit â I think he paid me to cut his lawn or something â and one day he told me, âcome into my garage, I want to show you something.â
And he pulled out this dusty old rock tumbler. It was a motor and a coffee can and a band between them. And he said âcome out here with me,â so we went out to the back and we got some rocks, just some regular old ugly rocks and we put them in the can with a little bit of liquid and a little bit of grit powder, and he turned the motor on and said âcome back tomorrow,â as the tumbler was turning and making a racket.
So I came back the next day and what we took out were these amazingly beautiful and polished rocks. The same common stones that had gone in â through rubbing against each other, creating a little bit of friction, creating a little bit of noise â had come out as these beautiful polished rocks.
And thatâs always been my metaphor for a team working really hard on something theyâre passionate about. Itâs that through the team, through that group of incredibly talented people bumping up against each other, having arguments, having fights sometimes, making some noise, and working together, they polish each other, and they polish their ideas. And what comes out are these really beautiful stones.
On Criticism
People are being counted on to do specific pieces of the puzzle. And the most important thing I think you can do for somebody whoâs really good and whoâs really being counted on is to point out to them when their work isnât good enough, and to do it very clearly, and to articulate why, and to get them back on track. And you need to do that in a way that does not call into question your confidence in their abilities, but leaves not much room for interpretation.
On Help
Microsoftâs orbit was made possible by a Saturn V booster called IBM.
On Taste
The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste, and what that means is â and I donât mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way â in the sense that they donât think of original ideas, and they donât bring much culture into their product. And you say âwell why is that important?â Well, you know, proportionally spaced fonts come from typesetting and beautiful books, so thatâs where one gets the idea. And if it werenât for the Mac they would never have that in their products.
And so I guess I am saddened, not by Microsoft's success â I have no problem with their success. They have earned their success â I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate products. Their products have no spirit to them, no spirit of enlightenment about them. They are very pedestrian. And the sad part is that most customers donât have that spirit either. But the way that weâre going to ratchet up our species is to take the best and to spread it around to everybody so that everybody grows up with better things, and starts to understand the subtlety of these better things. And Microsoft is McDonaldâs.
So thatâs what saddens me â not that Microsoft has won, but that Microsoftâs products donât display more insight and more creativity.
On Technology
As we look back 10 years from now, the web is going to be the defining technology, the defining social moment for our generation.
I think itâs going to be huge.
On Tools
I read an article when I was very young in Scientific America. It measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet â you know, for bears and chimpanzees and raccoons and birds and fish â how many kilocalories per kilometer did they spend to move? And humans were measured too. And the condor won, it was the most efficient. And mankind, the crown of creation, came in with rather an unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list.
But somebody there had the brilliance to test a human riding a bicycle, and it blew away the condor, all the way off the charts. And I remember this really had an impact on me, I remember thinking that humans are tool builders, and we build tools that can dramatically amplify our innate human abilities.
And to me â we actually ran an ad like this, very early at Apple â the personal computer is the bicycle of the mind. And I believe that with every bone in my body, that of all the inventions of humans, the computer is going to rank near if not at the top as history unfolds and we look back. It is the most awesome tool that we have ever invented, and I feel incredibly lucky to be at exactly the right place in Silicon Valley, at exactly the right time where this invention has taken form.
On Theft
How do we know whatâs the right direction [for computers to take]?
Ultimately it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done, and then trying to bring those things in to what youâre doing.
Picasso had a saying: âGood artists copy, great artists steal.â And we (at Apple) have always been shameless about stealing great ideas. And I think part of what made Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to have been the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hasnât been for computer science, these people would all be doing amazing things in life in other fields. And they brought with them â we all brought to this effort â a very liberal arts air, a very liberal arts attitude, that we wanted to pull in the best we saw in these other fields into ours.
On Expression
There was a germ of something there. And itâs the same thing that causes people to want to be poets instead of bankers. I think thatâs a wonderful thing, and I think that same spirit can be put into products, and those products can be manufactured and given to people and they can sense that spirit. If you talk to people that use the Macintosh, they love it. I mean you donât hear people loving products very often. But you could feel it, there was something really wonderful there.
So I donât think that most of the really best people that Iâve worked with have worked with computers for the sake of working with computers. They work with computers because they are the medium that is best capable of transmitting some feeling that you have that you want to share with other people. And before they invented these things, all these people would have done other things. But computers were invented, and they did come along, and all these people did get interested in them, either in school or before school, and said âHey, this is the medium that I think I can say something in."
On Talent
I observed something fairly early on at Apple, which I didnât know how to explain then, but Iâve thought a lot about it since. Most things in life have a dynamic range in which [the ratio of] âaverageâ to âbestâ is at most 2:1.
For example, if you go to New York City and get an average taxi cab driver, versus the best taxi cab driver, youâll probably get to your destination with the best taxi driver 30% faster. And an automobile; whatâs the difference between the average car and the best? Maybe 20%? The best CD player versus the average CD player? Maybe 20%? So 2:1 is a big dynamic range for most things in life.
Now, in software, and it used to be the case in hardware, the difference between the average software developer and the best is 50:1; maybe even 100:1. Very few things in life are like this, but what I was lucky enough to spend my life doing, which is software, is like this.
So Iâve built a lot of my success on finding these truly gifted people, and not settling for âBâ and âCâ players, but really going for the âAâ players. And I found something⊠I found that when you get enough âAâ players together, when you go through the incredible work to find these âAâ players, they really like working with each other. Because most have never had the chance to do that before. And they donât work with âBâ and âCâ players, so itâs self-policing. They only want to hire âAâ players. So you build these pockets of âAâ players and it just propagates.