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On the Value of Constraints
design, processes & methodologies
July 26, 2003, 11:33 PM
Over the course of this summer session, I've been working on a variety of projects, many of which involve skills I haven't yet developed and concepts I haven't yet fully grasped. During the course of all this, I've experienced a semiprofound revelation.
Despite what you might think, in the majority of cases constraints are a Good Thing™.
By constraints, I mean limitations on our actions, the finite quantities of resources we're given to solve problems, frameworks we are required to work within, etc. A common example is the time constraint; I often complain that I don't have enough time to properly complete an assignment or code, up some software component. I've generally conceived of such things as necessary evils that we must, sadly, deal with and take into account if we wish to get things done. In a perfect world, however, there would be no constraints. We'd have all the time in the world, all the people we need, all the raw materials we could wish for, to come up with the perfect solution.
I've changed my mind, for several reasons. In Communication Design Fundamentals, we've been given a number of different design problems, generally fairly open but with some constraints attached. For example, in the first week we developed a poster for a series of talks and used various typographic attributes (line spacing, stroke weight, etc.) to communicate the hierarchy of information. At first, we were limited to a single typographic "variable", later assignments opened it up to two or three. We quickly found that this freedom made things more difficult (although we certainly came up with better designs with two variables rather than one). Likewise, during Dan's week we started off arranging our quote using only positioning, then we got to play with stroke weights and size variation and whatnot, and sure enough it got harder (and some of the designs started to look "overdone"). Dan told us that in this class he was imposing the constraints on us, but in our work we would have to decide what constraints to impose on ourselves. An interesting proposition. I wonder if the qualities that make a designer (or an artist) great aren't so much "wild creativity" but a form of intelligently constrained creativity that knows where to direct its energy for maximum effectiveness.
This meme even gets reflected in the class itself; I've come to feel that I enjoy the course as much as I do because each professor has been forced to boil down their topic into something that can be taught in fifteen hours. This has lead to a nice mix of hands-on practice, minimal instruction, and a wide (but not stretched) view of the topic area. Great for an introductory course.
Likewise, I've been mucking around with Perl quite a bit lately, a language that is highly unconstrained and suffers as a result. There may be More Than One Way To Do It, but this intimidates novices and makes Perl code notoriously hard to read. As does everything, Perl has its advantages as well as its disadvantages, but a few more constraints may have resulted in a much cleaner design.
In the end, constraints help get things done. To return to the ever-present time constraint: if I was given the infinite time I desired, its likely I'd never finish anything (which happens all too often with personal projects for which I set no goals). In academia, a sector I've become all to familiar with recently, there are often few time constraints for day to day work. Many of the academics I know tend to wander aimlessly or squabble over relatively unimportant details. As a result, high-quality outcomes don't often come from university labs.
Another form of constraint comes in setting goals. In a way, goals are the self-imposed constraints Dan was talking about. Matt argues that every project needs to have a clear set of goals to guide it, otherwise no one will accomplish anything meaningful. Unless you commit to accomplishing measurable objectives within a given time frame, you'll wander aimlessly, wasting your money and your time.
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Redesigning My Space
aesthetics, design, life & times, personal
July 25, 2003, 04:07 PM
I've moved into a new apartment recently. I moved in two weekends ago and spent last weekend cleaning and redecorating. All my Pittsburgh friends will (hopefully) get to see it in person soon since I hope to have a housewarming party, but in the meantime (and for those who won't be able to attend), here's a few pictures I took.
Street View
Front Porch
Kitchen
Dining Room
Dining Room Wall
Living Room
My Center Of Operations (a.k.a. Desk)
Reading Area
Patio
Backyard
All these pictures are partially to make Micah happy, who has always frowned at me for having too much boring text on this weblog :).
As I was redecorating my apartment I couldn't help but think back to the design process we learned about on the first day of CDF. I went through the familiarization phase while looking for apartments and while moving all my junk, then the development phase when I decided where the major furniture would go, then finally the refinement phase when I positioned all the little things on the shelves and tables and desks. And sure enough, there were "architectural" issues; it would be prohibitively expensive for me to move to a new place just because I didn't like the way my stuff fit into it.
Looks like the basic pattern (along with its consequences) fits to even the most mundane design tasks.
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Personality Typology
psychology
July 22, 2003, 09:27 PM
Micah and Dan have been talking about the Myers-Briggs (/Keirsey/Jung/etc.) personality test recently, so I thought now might be an appropriate time to weigh in on the subject.
I've read David Keirsey's Please Understand Me, which is an excellent book that I recommend highly. Keirsey builds on the basic personality type system by talking about personality temperments, or the four major groupings of the sixteen types. Here's how it breaks down.
To Keirsey, the most important type distinction is Intuition versus Sensing (N versus S). He argues that the visionary, head-in-the-clouds intuitives and the pragmatic, down-to-earth sensers have fundamentally different worldviews, and two people who differ along this type line will have to work hard to understand and accept one another. Thus this is the first major division among the types. The second division (to make four temperments) depends on the first; if you are a senser (S) type, the important division is Judging versus Perceiving (J versus P). If you are an intuitive (N) type, the important distinction is Thinking versus Feeling (T versus F). So we wind up with:
- the freedom-loving, egalitarian, thrill-seeking Dionysian or Artisan temperment (the SP)
- the duty-bound, paternal, tradition-oriented Epimethean or Guardian temperment (the SJ)
- the knowledge-based, power-seeking, skill-building Promethean or Rational temperment (the NT)
- and finally the self-actualizing, relationship-oriented, spiritual Apollonian or Idealist temperment (the NF).
To Keirsey, the Extraverted versus Introverted (E versus I) distinction is the least important and thus never factors in to temperment.
People with the same temperment have similar goals for and outlooks on life. They may find it easier to communicate with others of the same temperment. For example, as I've mentioned before, I test as an INTJ (although my Judging/Perceiving distinction is fairly even and I have a strong Feeling side to complement the Thinking). Note that I share the same temperment as Micah and Dan (the NT Rational), so we should find that our goals in life (building our skills, acquiring knowledge, reshaping the world, etc.) and our worldview (reality exists to be reworked, we will never live up to our own expectations, etc.) to be similar. This doesn't mean we'll agree on all the fundamental questions of life; we won't. But it does mean our personalities give us a similar understanding of the world that we won't share with our Artisan, Guardian, and Idealist friends.
So do I actually believe all this? Well, yes and no. No personality theories are currently considered scientifically valid by most academic psychologists. This is mostly because a fuzzy concept like "personality" isn't amenable to scientific studies; it varies too much to test in any controlled environment. Given this constraint, we need to ask whether its worth thinking about anyway. My answer to this question is always yes. So I'd argue Myers-Briggs is worth giving serious consideration.
That said, I'd also argue your consideration shouldn't be too serious. As Jung originally conceived of them, the personality types are archetypes, or idealized portraits of distilled personality traits. They do not describe real people. So if you take Keirsey's test and look over the type descriptions, you'll probably find your real personality overlaps a few of the types, as I alluded to by describing myself as "an INTJ with equal Perceiving and a strong Feeling side". So it's worth remembering that Myers-Briggs as a predictive model is a rough measure at best.
Posted by Dan on July 23, 2003 at 08:05 PM
I wonder if there is anyone in our line of work/study who ISN'T an NT? It is interesting to me to see what jobs suit what personality types. I also find the distribution of the personality types (40-45% Guardian, 35-40% Artisan, 5-10% Idealist, 5-10% Rational) pretty interesting too. http://keirsey.com/scripts/stats.cgi
Posted by Rob on July 23, 2003 at 09:14 PM
I would guess (and I emphasize that I could be way off) that Neema ( http://www.neemanet.com/ ) is an SP Artisan type. I'd also guess that Andrew ( http://www.stinkytofu.tv/ ) is an NF Idealist type (I'm not sure whether you've met him or not, Dan).
But you're right; the proportion of NT Rationals is probably much higher at CMU than the world at large. CMUish work is the kind of thing that gets Rationals excited. But its definitely not a given; there are plenty of people in the world who work in high technology that aren't Rationals. Like I said, the whole typology only works as a predictive model to a certain extent, with lots of caveats.
Fun food for thought though.
Email Rob:
Expressive Type, Visual Structure, and Human-Centered Design
aesthetics, design, usability
July 21, 2003, 07:59 PM
This past week in CDF we studied Expressive Typography with Dan Boyarski, head of the School of Design and typographer extraordinaire. Our running assignment was to arrange a quote on a page in a way that expresses its meaning. For the first couple iterations we were constrained to just positioning the text, for the rest we could also change the font size and stroke weight.
First off, I was amazed at how much emotion and meaning you can communicate using only type (no color, no images, and no shapes other than letter-forms). I'd seen typographic presentations before, both static and kinetic (kinetic typography, or videos of moving type, is one of Dan's research interests), but viewing someone else's piece doesn't quite drive home the point as much as actually sitting down and doing one yourself. The sheer number of variables and choices was daunting, to say the least, when the position, size, and weight of every word (or even every letter) necessarily conveys meaning across even small visual differences. And this is just type. When I imagine trying to put together a piece using the full range of colors, shapes, drawings, pictures, time (if the piece is a video), etc. my head starts to swim. Yet from the design perspective, interaction design (what we do to design software systems and other interactive experiences) is all these and more; its like kinetic design minus the strict sense of control the linear flow of a video gives its creator, like a movie where the viewer rather than the director gets to choose the next set of frames to play every few seconds from potentially hundreds of options.
This "design perspective" is a fundamentally different way of thinking about the world. The visual designer learns to give their full attention to how something looks, to its visual representation. Programmers, philosophers, writers, and (usually) interface designers generally think quite differently; to them the underlying ideas are more important than the visual presentation of those ideas. Yet perhaps the visual designers have something here; after all, we know that the appearance of a web site is the most influential factor in determining whether users trust the content. And that's not all it affects.
We humans are visual creatures; sight is our primary sense and thus it is integral to the way we think. In many cases, people can suck in and process a lot more information when they can see it all laid out before them than they can if they have to view bits and pieces in sequence or, even worse, read a linguistic description of it. This jives with some of the studies I've done for Newsable; I found that all of my users were quite adept at visually scanning for interesting content, but they were much worse at describing what they were looking for. Likewise, Dan preached about the need for large walls in project rooms so designers can post their work up for easy comparisons. Visual comparisons of design artifacts are much easier when you can see all the artifacts you're comparing at once.
Another interesting lesson, both for this expressive type week and the more mundane hierarchy week, was how much the visual presentation dictates the structure people ascribe to the content. This is pretty clear when you compare my final version of the first assignment with the raw text; this shouldn't be new to anyone. But it was interesting to see that visual presentation isn't just important for sound information design; it even proved critical for the "fuzzier" quotes. Take a look at my classmate Jennifer's piece and you'll see what I mean; the quiet meditation of her quote comes out clearly in the small size of the text, its position in the bottom corner of the vast whitespace of the page, the natural grouping of the words through line breaks and indentation, etc. (The papyrus piece is © 2003 Jennifer Anderson. All rights reserved. Used with permission.)
This approach to visual design as a communication medium that enhances (or even completely changes) the meaning of the content is very much in line with the philosophies of information design and technical writing that I'm familiar with. So far, the professors we've had have talked a lot about communication and what message our designs are sending to the viewers. I've been impressed by how much attention these expert designers pay to the viewer (dare I say the user?) of the artifacts they produce (or are asking us to produce), because it means their basic values are very much in line with ours over in HCI. Dan even outright said "We believe in human-centered design". Insofar as this holds in practice for both camps, we'll always have a common base we can stand on to collaborate. Most designers don't do user tests, and most usability practitioners don't do critiques, but these are just differences in approach, and both approaches are valuable in their own ways. There seem to be many opportunities for synergy between these two cultures and bringing them together, as we're ostensibly doing here at CMU, is a tremendously good thing.
Email Rob:
Architecturally Sensitive Visual Design Scenarios?
aesthetics, software development
July 21, 2003, 12:38 AM
Last week Dan Boyarski, the head of the School of Design, was our instructor for CDF. More on what I learned from him shortly; I have to check up on an intellectual property rights issue first.
In the mean time, though, I wanted to mention a comment he made in our last class about software design and limitations for designers. He made the (quite correct) point several times throughout the week that computing as a design medium was still quite immature; we've only had a couple of decades or so of computing "for the rest of us" as compared to hundreds of years since the development of the printing press. As a result, we haven't yet had time to explore the capabilities and limitations of this medium. In particular, he mentioned the "square windows" phenomenon; most desktop UIs only allow windows to be rectangular boxes. He implied this was a silly limitation, and if it was too difficult to code a non-square window he'd find someone else who was willing to do it.
I have a couple thoughts on this. First off, my immediate reaction was that this was another architecturally-sensitive usability scenario for U&SA. It also made me wonder if we weren't possibly missing anything by not having a visual designer like Dan in the U&SA research group. Bonnie, Len, and I have been mostly considering visual design concerns to be solved by the separation patterns (MVC, PAC, etc.) but maybe this isn't true. Maybe we're being as shortsighted as the software engineers who assumed the separation patterns solved the only usability-related architectural issue. What would it take to make windows have arbitrary shapes? What are the benefits to the user that would convince toolkit and application programmers to implement such a feature? These are questions we may need to consider.
Having said all this, I now want to pick on Dan for a minute. His comment does ignore several basic truths about software development; the "all windows are rectangles" rule was an important architectural decision made by interface developers back when non-rectangular windows would have been too much for current hardware to handle. This is no longer true, but it has become so ingrained in the architecture of major windowing systems that changing it is difficult, to say the least. Like all architectural issues, this is a fact about the world, not a failing of software developers. Architecturally-sensitive changes are hard to make any way you cut it, and as I've argued before, this truth is based on the structure of how software systems (as well as systems in general) must be constructed. It is as ingrained in the fabric of reality as the shape of the universe, the nature of time, and the mystery of quantum states. Because of all this, it will take time for us to move to toolkits and frameworks that support non-rectangular windows as well as a number of other features that may prove important to designers. Meaningful collaboration between software designers and visual designers may speed up this process, but in the meantime, patience must be our primary virtue.
Posted by Rob on July 21, 2003 at 12:41 AM
To be fair, I want to add that my impression of Dan is that he's a pretty learned and multidisciplinary guy, and that is thinking is probably much more sophisticated than I've made it appear. I just wanted to make a point so I picked on him for this one tiny little remark ;).
Posted by Dan on July 21, 2003 at 03:56 PM
Since Dan said that, I've been trying to think of what advantage a circle or otherwise "irregular" window would give to users. The only one I was able to come up with is some kind of oval "lens" through which other content (images and text) could be viewed an manipulated.
For example, like a jeweler's eyepiece, you could look at objects very close. Or translate text from another language. Or peek into files that aren't open yet. An object like this would still need a handle on it though for manipulation.
Otherwise, I'm not sure how much good having different windows would be. (Not to mention you can already resize most windows into various shapes). Having a totally different metaphor for a UI...now that's a different ball of wax... (http://nooface.net/)
Posted by Rob on July 21, 2003 at 04:19 PM
Dan, you've just independently (I assume) reinvented the UI metaphor known as Magic Lenses, a technology developed by Xerox Parc in the early 90s. Kerry, Matt, and I learned some about them in SAUI (Software Architectures for User Interfaces) last fall. Now if only you'd published about it ten years ago, maybe you could have knocked down Parc's patent on the technology that's prevented it from getting widely implemented in any of the common GUI toolkits...
For the curious, more info can be found at: http://www2.parc.com/istl/projects/MagicLenses/
Posted by Jeff on July 21, 2003 at 08:29 PM
One point in favor of rectangular windows is their compatability with rectangular computer screens. No wasted space. It's possible that no one debated about what shape to make windows since the first GUIs didn't have any. Some student programmers, working on their own, found a way to duplicate the rectangular space of the desktop and de facto rectangular windows were born.
Audion from Panic Software is a pretty good example of an application using non-rectangular windows. Through its skinning ability, the windows take pretty much any shape the designer wants. It's nice for building an unobtrusive MP3 player without any window chrome, but might not scale well for more robust usage.
Posted by Dan on July 21, 2003 at 09:19 PM
Nope, I've never seen or heard of magic lenses. Every good idea I have was done at least a decade before I've thought of it, so I'm not surprised someone else has a patent on it. Last year, I came up with this cool idea for a device, attached to the computer, with a track ball on the bottom. It controls your cursor on the screen. Oh, and there's a button on it too, for clicking stuff.
Interesting that their lens is square and has no handle: you just grab the shape and push it around. Changing the lens is really clunky. Not to mention, I would guess, turning it off.
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Posted by Dan on July 27, 2003 at 11:35 PM
I would argue that the quality that makes a designer great is being able to work within a defined set of constraints (material, medium, space, client, etc.). The quality that makes an artist great is the ability to not be constrained, to harness more "raw creativity." Art, after all, only has to obey itself/the artist to be successful. Design has to work/communicate/function to be successful.
Now we can digress into discussions on What is Art? and What is Design? and What is Success?...
Posted by Rob on July 31, 2003 at 02:12 PM
Before I make that digression, I'd actually argue that art, too, does follow certain constraints. Granted, these constraints are generally self-imposed by the artist, but they are real nonetheless. This is why we have "movements" in art; certain groups of artists, generally aggregated in time and/or space, have agreed to all follow the same constraints, which is why their art all follows a common style (of course they don't officially "agree" to anything, the agreement is through teaching, bandwagon effects, idea borrowing, and other subtle social pressures).
Of course, some of the greatest artists are the ones that defied these norms, but I'd still argue all artists work within frameworks to some degree or another. I like the way Craig talks about these frameworks as "points of departure" rather than "constraints". I think we're referring to the same things, but his language puts a more positive spin on them which I believe is more accurate. Constraints/Points of departure often help _foster_ creativity, not inhibit it.
Posted by Dan on July 31, 2003 at 05:03 PM
The sonnet is the classic example of this. Self-imposed constraints that can increase/highlight creativity (see Shakespeare). But the difference is that, in design, the message and the constraints aren't typically the creator's. Picasso might choose to have a blue period, but a product designer who only works in shades of blue will likely find his ass handed to him by the client. Or an interaction designer who refuses to use a radio button.
I think most artists latch on to certain "constraints" (some might call them themes) not because it sparks their creativity, but rather because it is the best way they can find to express what they want.