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, “Can this constraint now be removed because the world has changed? Can it be entirely circumvented by working outside the design space?”
The momentum of making
Limitations narrow a big process into a smaller, more understandable space to explore. It’s 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.
“Design” is now “Product”
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 “creativity”; 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 design—the power to define constraints—is a privileged political position within an organization, and not everybody can occupy it. In other words, the “seat at the table” 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 doesn’t matter what your title is; Jobs is the designer in that scenario.
Delight is constraints, joyfully embraced
An Article by Craig ModAnd what is delight? For me, delight is born from a tool’s 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 there’s 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 played—and adored—by 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 processor—but Pentium is preferred.
- Ad Lib or PC speaker supported—but Sound Blaster is best.
- Show up to the party with at least 4 megabytes of RAM—but 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
A 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.
Two Cycles
Gorgeous artwork by Minori Asada.
Among the trees
To accommodate the spaces between the trees, I built three walls in a radial pattern. Filling out the spaces on both sides of these three spline-like walls, I came up with a structure that appears to be slipped in among the trees. This design allowed us to proceed without cutting down any of the woods.
Small economies
I refer to small money-earning business that consist of the work of a visible individual, or have evolved from a personal hobby or skill, as "small economies". We can include in this category newer forms of at-home work—side businesses, telecommuting and the like. The amount of income is unimportant; meager profits are compensated for by the motivation of the owner. A small economy may or may not be someone's main form of livelihood, but it is always a spontaneously conceived and continuing activity.
An extremely closed structure
Nearly all housing in Japan today consists of exclusively residential units for salaried workers and their nuclear families. Such residences have, by definition, no reason to interface with their surroundings.
Salaried workers commute to workplaces outside, and often a considerable distance from, their homes. Residences built for these workers do not contain a place of livelihood—in the broader sense, a place for exchange. This "residence-only housing" is only a place for the nuclear family to eat and sleep, with no occasions for interaction with the outside world, and no need to foster a sense of belonging to the community at large. Thus the only organizational principle is the maintenance of privacy. Both in external appearance and in lifestyle, it is an extremely closed structure.
Ecological cycles
This house exists in the midst of a year-long cycle of natural phenomena. One might say that this cycle entails the periodic "rise and fall" of the ground surface. In winter it sinks below a snow cover that grows head-high or more; as spring approaches, this height gradually decreases until we can see the actual ground surface, not yet covered with undergrowth. With summer the vegetation grows higher and higher until the plaza seems once again to be lower than its surroundings. With the falling of the leaves, autumn restores our ability to penetrate these surroundings at eye level, at least until the snow begins to fall again... Through the four seasons, we experience the sensation of the ground rising and falling, like the ebb and flow of the tide.
I call this cycle of natural phenomena an ecological cycle.
Doing community
There is a Japanese catchphrase, community suru, literally "making" or "doing" community. I will never forget the queasy feeling that came over me when I first heard that term, phrased as if community were a kind of event.
Hold an event, bring people together, get people who might otherwise never meet to interact. It's a wonderful thought. I have nothing against events per se. However, if they are not spontaneous and voluntary, they will not last. That is my objection to the keep-it-lively concept of community. The perception of community as event stems, I think, from a yearning for the festivals and rituals that once flourished in rural communities in Japan. But those events occurred precisely because a community existed, not the other way around.
What are those borders made of?
Functionalist modern architecture has prioritized the functionality of interiors and treated surfaces and external appearances as an outcome of that priority. Diagrams illustrating functional layouts generally frame them with thick borders. Updating conventional program theory entails questioning what those thick borders are actually made of, and how they should be designed. A dynamic program theory should be one that turns these thick borders into more organic interfaces that will foster exchanges and interactions.
An ecological cycle
In the design of his own residence / workplace, Toshiharu Naka created a small ecological cycle. Rows of green planters in front of the wall protect the house from the sun and help cool it in summer. Rainwater is collected via catch-basins from the roof, and used to water the planters.
In the water buckets is a micro-cycle — fish live in the buckets, eating mosquitos from the planters, eliminating the need for pesticides.