Have you ever thought about the relationship between having constraints and creativity? I have recently found an article called "Creativity Loves Constraints" which was published on BussinessWeek. Basically, the author, who is the Google's vice president of search products and user experience, believes that it helps to have some constraint to see a lot of innovation. Having this article in mind, I turned to ACM DL and found this short paper "Simplicity in interaction design" presented at the first international conference on Tangible and embedded interaction TEI '07. This paper presents a design exercise which forces designers to imagine alternative ways to represent information when there is a specific constraint. This exercise shows how an arbitrary constraint can give new insight to design. These two articles made me think: in accessibility community, "don't we all do these kind of exercises all the time?". Simplicity in interaction design

Attaining simplicity is a key challenge in interaction design. Our approach relies on a minimalist design exercise to explore the communication capacity for interaction components. This approach results in expressive design solutions, useful perspectives of interaction design and new interaction techniques.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1226969.1226997
Full Proceedings: Proceedings of the first international conference on Tangible and embedded interaction TEI '07

Labels: constraint, Creativity, design, interaction, simplicity