#11 - Constrained Creativity
Constraints are good for creativity. It seems a bit paradoxical, but I got onto this train of thought while thinking about 3D printing. There’s near limitless possibilities and yet the vast majority of creations I’ve seen are things that could be made by hand.
The art world provides interesting examples of what happens when you remove constraints. I took a history of jazz class in college (in a rare and jealous glimpse of the non-engineering collegiate experience). I don’t remember much but what I do remember is enjoying pretty much everything except for free jazz. Jazz, as you probably know, is heavy on improvisation but, until free jazz, there was always some sort of structure that restrained the musicians. When you listen to free jazz and you are not on whatever musical dimension you need to be to “understand” it, it just sounds … bad.
Same with modern art. A sculpture by Marcel Duchamp that abides by no rules.
And again with poetry. Here’s a poem by Anne Carson whose genius was too much for any poetic meter.
It seemed even to apply to cuisine in answering why traditional American cooking was rather boring. From Turning the Tables : Restaurants and the Rise of the American Middle Class:
Observers offered a host of reasons for America’s failure to achieve gustatory greatness…Others joined the Chicago Tribune in claiming that the nation’s agricultural abundance “has wrought [culinary] scarcity” by discouraging creative cooking.
Though I thought I saw a clear correlation between lack of creativity and lack of constraint, the art examples could conceivably just be a difference in taste. So I turned to my nearest search engine, and found that there’s been a paper written about this subject. To quote Wired, which quotes the paper:
Consistently, these studies show that encountering an obstacle in one task can elicit a more global, Gestalt-like processing style that automatically carries over to unrelated tasks, leading people to broaden their perception, open up mental categories, and improve at integrating seemingly unrelated concepts.
That’s enough to convince me that my own opinion is right. So to bring it back to engineering, we’re living in a time that’s possibly the most unconstrained ever. We have access to all sorts of materials that are stronger, stiffer, and able to last longer than ever before. They’re nice and homogeneous, so we don’t have to work around any defects, like knots in wood. We have five-axis CNCs and 3D printers that can make any shape your heart desires. But it seems that all that development could come at a cost. We’re not likely to end up in a urinal-as-a-sculpture place because we’re still heavily bound by the laws of physics. But I do think we should consider, at least periodically, using some “lower tech” design and manufacturing tools and materials to keep the creative juices flowing.
Drawing exercise #2. If you missed it, here’s why I’m learning to draw.