Boosting Creativity Through Constraints

After my experience with the unstructured un-conference model last weekend, I was interested to read Adam Richardson’s thoughts on constraints and creativity in Harvard Business Review. I liked this analogy:

In Silicon Valley start-ups a common philosophy these days is “mobile first”: create the mobile app or mobile version of the web site before you do the “full” version. Partly this is driven by the fact that many of these start-ups’ customers will be accessing the new service primarily through a mobile device, and may never look at the web site on a desktop browser. But a side benefit is that a phone’s small screen forces discipline about what’s really critical to communicate to the customer, and which functionality customers will really need.