Slides from our presentation of the paper Toward A Constraint-Oriented Pragmatist Understanding Of Design Creativity at the International Conference on Design Creativity (ICDC) in Glasgow, September 2012. The paper explores the potentials of pragmatist philosophy to enrich the discourse on design creativity in general and the concept of constraints specifically. We argue that pragmatism can inspire and inform the study of constraints in design creativity by offering a coherent and well-developed frame of understanding how designerly inquiry unfolds as a complex interplay between the designer and the resources at hand in the situation, which may continuously alternate between constraining and enabling roles, or even take on both roles simultaneously.

1. TOWARD A CONSTRAINT-ORIENTED PRAGMATIST
UNDERSTANDING OF DESIGN CREATIVITY
MICHAEL MOSE BISKJAER & PETER DALSGAARD
CENTRE FOR ADVANCED VISUALISATION AND INTERACTION (CAVI)
PARTICIPATORY INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY CENTRE (PIT)
AARHUS UNIVERSITY
DENMARK

2. Interaction design
CASES
DESIGN CREATIVITY
PRAGMATISM CONSTRAINTS
Philosophy Creativity
Aesthetics

4. AARHUS UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF ARTS CENTRE FOR ADVANCED PARTICIPATORY INFORMATION
VISUALIZATION AND TECHNOLOGY CENTRE
INTERACTION (PIT)
(CAVI)

5. EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN RESEARCH

6. PARTICIPATORY METHODS

7. THE EMERGENCE AND TRANSFORMATION OF DESIGN CONCEPTS

8. (Dalsgaard, Halskov Nielsen 2008)
MAPPING AND ANALYSING WHAT HAPPENS IN THE DESIGN PROCESS...

9. ... AS WELL AS WHAT HAPPENS IN USE SITUATIONS

10. PRAGMATISM AND DESIGN CREATIVITY
Situation A situated and emergent process,
which is explorative and characterised by
Inquiry reciprocal interplay between the designer and
the environment ...
Transformation ... with the aim of transforming the situation
through new insights and/or interventions
Technology ... and in which the designer employs a range
of tools and techniques; these resources are
often an essential part of the process.

11. Interaction design
CASES
DESIGN CREATIVITY
PRAGMATISM CONSTRAINTS
Philosophy Creativity
Aesthetics

12. CONSTRAINTS
featured in all creativity-related domains and disciplines - AT A GLANCE
from philosophy, art, management, political and social
sciences to psychology, sports, medicine, and engineering
design. Thus, no transparent cross-disciplinary terminology.
Latin: ‘constringere‘ meaning ‘to restrain, compress, bind or ETYMOLOGY
press together’ (the freedictionary.com/constrain)
‘Constraints are limitations on action. They set boundaries on BASIC DEFINITION
solutions’ (Vandenbosch Gallagher 2004: 198)
‘Constraints on thinking do not merely constrain, but also DUAL NATURE:
make certain thoughts - certain mental structures - possible’ RESTRAINING AND
ENABLING…
(Boden 2004: 46; Onarheim Wiltschnig 2010)

13. LACK OF COMMON TERMINOLOGY RESEARCH IN GENERAL
‘Constraints’ encompass creative choices, preferences,
obstructions, hindrances, requirements, demands, desires,,
conventions, expectations, limitations, rules, inabilities, etc.
CONSTRAINTS AS INTEGRAL TO DESIGN DESIGN RESEARCH
A growing interest in constraints, from engineering design to
more art-oriented practices: ‘Formally, all design can be
thought of as constraint satisfaction, and one might be
tempted to propose global constraint satisfaction as a
universal solution for design.’ (Chandrasekaran 1990: 65).
CONSTRAINTS IN CREATIVITY RESEARCH CREATIVITY RESEARCH
Necessary that coming creativity research looks much closer
toward the entwinement of constraints and creative agency –
and from several angles (Kaufman and Sternberg 2010)

14. MAIN CURRENT CONTRIBUTIONS
TO CONSTRAINT TYPOLOGIES
Bryan Lawson: How Designers Think (2006)
DESIGN and ARCHITECTURE
Patricia D. Stokes: Creativity from Constraints (2006)
PSYCHOLOGY and ART
Jon Elster: Ulysses Unbound (2000)
PHILOPSOPHY and ‘AESTHETICS’
‘CREATIVITY CONSTRAINTS’
Our proposal for an arts and humanities-based, domain-general unifying descriptor to
address how constraints are inherent in and both restrain and enable creative processes.

15. A BASIC FORMALIZED CONSTRAINT TYPOLOGY
FOR ANALYZING CREATIVE PROCESSES
Intrinsic Hard soft
Incidental
Beneficial constraints Imposed Hard soft
Essential Self-imposed Hard Soft
Adapted from Elster 2000.

16. AESTHETIC STRATEGIES OF ENABLING CREATIVITY CONSTRAINTS
CREATIVITY CONSTRAINTS
IN AVANT-GARDE ART

17. A CROSS-DOMAIN CONTINUUM OF
CREATIVITY CONSTRAINTS
UNDER-CONSTRAINED OVER-CONSTRAINED
PROBLEMS PROBLEMS
Poetry Filmmaking Engineering
SELF-IMPOSED CREATIVITY CONSTRAINTS
LEVERAGE THE
POTENTIAL FOR
Adapted from Stacey Eckert 2000.
CREATIVITY

18. POPULAR LITERATURE
ALLEGED METHODS FOR
FOSTERING CREATIVITY

19. BALANCING
CREATIVITY CONSTRAINTS ‘THE SWEET SPOT’ OF CREATIVITY
Onarheim Biskjaer (in press).

20. BALANCING
CREATIVITY CONSTRAINTS ‘THE SWEET SPOT’ OF CREATIVITY
Onarheim Biskjaer (in press).

21. CREATIVITY IN DESIGN CREATIVITY IN DESIGN?
OR A topic understood in very diverse ways by several individual
conceptualizations. Addressed analytically and descriptively.
DESIGN CREATIVITY? (Askland, Ostwald Williams 2010)
or
DESIGN CREATIVITY?
We understand ‘design’ as pertaining to a unique human
faculty for promoting intentional change and innovation
through exploration and reflection (Löwgren and Stolterman 2004).
Design is always culturally embedded. Thus, we argue that it is
profitably to inform design research proper by looking toward
the arts and humanities – both back and forward…

22. Interaction design
CASES
DESIGN CREATIVITY
PRAGMATISM CONSTRAINTS
Philosophy Creativity
Aesthetics

23. CONCLUSIONS
PRAGMATISM AND DESIGN CREATIVITY
- A well-established school of thought that has already inspired and informed studies of
the design process and design thinking
- A nuanced and consistent conceptual framework that posits design creativity as an
emergent, distributed, and technological phenomenon
CREATIVITY CONSTRAINTS AND DESIGN CREATIVITY
- A pragmatist framework for cross-disciplinary analyses of design processes,
emphasizing the potential of proficient and innovative constraint management
- Analytical insights into ways to scaffold concrete case-tested methods for optimization
of design processes based on enabling self-imposed creativity constraints
- A conceptual bridge for informing design studies with key cross-disciplinary findings
from the arts and humanities; findings based on pragmatist, exploratory case studies.

24. THANK YOU
CONTACT
Michael Mose Biskjaer
imvmmb@hum.au.dk
Peter Dalsgaard
dalsgaard@cavi.dk
Aarhus University, Denmark
Centre for Participatory IT (PIT)
www.cavi.dk
Centre for Advanced Visualization and Interaction (CAVI)
www.pit.au.dk For references, please see proceedings

25. REFERENCES: REFERENCES
Askland, H.H., Ostwald, M., Williams, A. 2010. Changing
Conceptualisations of Creativity in Design, in Desire '10: Proceedings
of the first conference on Creativity and Innovation in Design, Aarhus,
Denmark, 4-11
Löwgren, J., Stolterman, E. 2004. Thoughtful Interaction Design: A
Design Perspective on Information Technology. The MIT Press,
Massachusetts, USA
Boden, M.A. 2004. The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms. 2
Routledge, London; New York
Onarheim, B., Wiltschnig, S. 2010. Opening and Constraining:
Constraints and Their Role in Creative Processes, in Desire '10:
Proceedings of the first conference on Creativity and Innovation in
Design, Aarhus, Denmark, 83-89