When we create a new brand at Fierce, one of the very first tools we provide to our clients is a brand standards guide. A rulebook, plain and simple. A way to navigate and control the use of their new investment carefully within their organization so that it can immediately benefit from consistency. Our brand standards guides are precise and detailed and exact so that the designer using it can have the freedom to design, yet not hurt the equity of the brand with improper use.
So are we providing freedom–or constraint?
Teams experiencing the right kinds of constraints in the right environments, and which saw opportunity in constraints, benefitted creatively from them. The results of this research challenge the assumption that constraints kill creativity, demonstrating instead that for teams able to accept and embrace them, there is freedom in constraint. http://oss.sagepub.com/content/35/4/551.abstract
The idea that boundaries can actually create freedom seems conflicting but I find it to be true. So does Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer when she said “Constraints shape and focus problems, and provide clear challenges to overcome as well as inspiration. Creativity loves constraints, but they must be balanced with a healthy disregard for the impossible.” Teresa Amabile revealed in an HBR blog post that while she had spent much of her career as a research psychologist showing how constraints can undermine creativity, she had discovered that the right sort of constraints can in fact “stoke the innovation fire.”
In the HBR article “How Intelligent Constraints Drive Creativity”, they find anecdotal evidence that well-designed constraints lead to creative success. But there’s academic research data on this phenomenon too. For example, a study conducted at the University of Amsterdam’s Department of Social Psychology proved that tough obstacles can prompt people to open their minds, look at the “big picture,” and make connections between things that are not obviously connected. This is an ability is called “global processing,” which is the hallmark of creativity.
It goes on to say than an intelligent obstacle or constraint is one laden with creative tension, whether stated in the form of a well-defined problem (“How might we simultaneously decrease both inventory and backorders?”) or a challenging goal (NASA’s 1990s mission to land a rover on Mars in half the time and a tenth the budget of the previous mission). An intelligent constraint informs creative action by outlining the “sandbox” within which people can play and guides that action not just by pointing out what to pursue but perhaps more importantly what to ignore.
I lean toward constraint but as in everything, balance must be sought.
“Here is one of the few effective keys to the design problem—the ability of the designer to recognize as many of the constraints as possible—his willingness and enthusiasm for working within these constraints. Constraints of price, of size, of strength, of balance, of surface, of time and so forth.” -Charles Eames.
