A little lack

When I lived in Philly for my postdoc, I lived in a neighborhood that, while charming in many respects, came with a serious downside: it was a food desert. One time I saw someone come into a local bar, head to the vending machine, and buy what appeared to be a dinner's worth of calories in pretzels and chewy gummy snacks. And it made sense! There was no store close by to go get real food. 

Oftentimes I would find myself in the following predicament. It was night, I was headed home from work, and the closest convenience store would require me getting off one SEPTA stop earlier and then walking home on a long stretch of empty street that I would not recommend to any single woman. Or I could head straight home but have to figure out what to make for dinner from what I had in my fridge and cupboards.

This predicament led to some of the weirdest and most inventive things I've cooked. If you have potatoes, pasta, anchovies, and lemon, and that’s it, then you gotta make something edible from those ingredients. 

Necessity is the mother of invention. Today we’ll explore how the constraints placed on us by situations can make us creative.

Constraining inputs to create novel product ideas

I think it's natural to worry that constraints might hinder creativity. In free-for-all brainstorming, or blue-sky thinking, constrains are put aside. Why bother with practical limitations or the eternal bummer that is reality? Let someone else figure that out later.

But what if constraints could actually help us come up with better, more novel ideas?

A series of studies has examined just this question. 

In one, college students were tasked with designing “a toy, anything a child (age 5-11) can use to play with” from a set of shapes that served as components for the idea. A pretty specific challenge!

Further constraints were layered on. Half of the participants selected five of 20 shapes to use in their toy idea (a condition named “they choose”), while the other half were randomly assigned five shapes to use (a condition named “we choose”).

Image source. The 20 shapes participants used to design a toy. 

Another constraint was how many shapes participants had to use. Half were told they could use as many of the five shapes as they wanted (a condition named “use as many”), while the other half were told to use all five of the shapes in their idea (a condition named “use all”). 

So, in total, there were four groups of participants that differed in their constraints. The most unconstrained group could choose what shapes to use and how many to use in their ideas, while the most constrained participants had to use all five of the shapes assigned to them.

Participants got to work iterating on their toy ideas. The researchers timed how long it took for each person to come up with a final idea. After turning in a drawing of the final design, they described their process. These responses were coded to determine whether participants were following a top-down process – first thinking of a specific toy they wanted to create and designing that toy from the shapes they had—or a bottom-up creative process where they explored what possible toys could be made from the shapes they had and building on those ideas.

The input constraints placed on the amateur toy designers had an effect: they increased the rate of bottom-up creative processing. This was especially true when people had to use all five of the shapes they were given. While their choices were constrained, their spirits were free.

Image source, annotations added. I’ve seen better quality graphs, but hey you get the idea. People who designed a toy from all five shapes they were given showed more bottom-up creative processing.  

Now here's another fun part. The researchers invited expert judges—consumer product designers—to judge how novel and appropriate each of the participants’ toy ideas were. Novelty and appropriateness (also called usefulness) are the two commonly accepted dimensions of creativity. If an idea is novel but not appropriate, or if it is appropriate but not novel, then it's not creative.

The three judges pretty much agreed on the ratings, so their ratings were collapsed for data analyses. The researchers used the degree of participants’ bottom-up creative processing and how long they spent working to predict the novelty and appropriateness of their ideas. 

Both factors – creative processing and time—predicted the novelty of the final toy idea. But neither one influenced the appropriateness of the idea.

Constraints push us to follow a more bottom-up creative process. And time is a powerful force. It helps us put that process to work. 

Researchers in this field talk a lot about the path of least resistance, so much so, that they regularly throw around the acronym POLR, something so ridiculous I cannot wait to sprinkle it into everyday speech if I ever get the chance. The path of least resistance is our predilection to do the easiest thing possible. We’re lazy! If we’re asked to design a toy, we’ll go with a known toy example, we’ll make things easy for ourselves. Constraints force us off the path of least resistance and get us to actually think and come up with something new.

Time is an important ally, however.

In a follow-up experiment, the researchers introduced time constraints in addition to the input constraints on shape selection. Matching the earlier results, people showed the most creative processing when they had input constraints but also ample time. Time constraints decreased how much creative processing people did when they had input constraints. And time constraints on their own (i.e., without input constraints) were no good, either. People just weren't that creative without constraints on the task itself.

Constraints help us get creative, but they don't work if we don’t have the time we need to think through ideas. And time’s not a very good constraint on its own.

Budget limits as a constraint

Aside from time, money is often a natural constraint. Another study explored the effects of financial constraints on people’s product ideas. It used the same task we talked about above: participants designed a children’s toy from a set of 20 shapes.  

But in this case, the researchers introduced a budget. They assigned each shape a price. Half of the participants were given a fixed budget and asked to choose shapes that fit the budget. The other half were working without a budget and could choose as many shapes as they wanted.

There were also some pretty profesh judges to rate the ideas. The researchers brought in two toy experts – one who hosted a popular children’s TV show about toys and another who wrote a popular blog on children’s creativity. These judges rated all the toy ideas on their creativity, which was explained as a combination of novelty and appropriateness. 

Constraints helped here, too. Participants who had to stick to a budget came up with more creative toy ideas than those left to their own devices. 

So, what’s better? Constraints on the input of a creative task or budget constraints? 

In another experiment, which closely resembled my Philly food desert experience or an episode of Iron Chef, the researchers tested this question. 

Participants, who were students in a culinary school, were asked to come up with a dish from a set of ingredients. They either had an input constraint, in which case they could only select at most five ingredients from a set of 30, or a budget constraint, in which case they could select however many ingredients they wanted but had to stick to a fixed budget. 

The creativity of the dishes people created was equivalent whether they had input constraints or budget constraints. Interestingly, however, participants who had budget constraints were more likely to use a top-down strategy to come up with an idea, while those who had budget constraints were more likely to use a bottom-up strategy. Following a top-down strategy, people first came up with an idea of a dish they wanted to make, and then made the ingredients work with that idea. Following a bottom-up strategy, people came up with an idea based on the ingredients that they had available.

Trying to stick to a fixed budget makes you get creative about how you follow an idea, by cleverly using what you have available. But being constrained in the inputs to a task makes you get creative about the idea itself by considering what you have available with fresh eyes.  

Another experiment in this study also uncovered another important factor, aside from time, that can increase the potency of constraints on creativity. That factor is the store of ideas that you can draw on for inspiration.

People’s possible store of ideas was operationalized as novelty seeking. People who are novelty seekers regularly seek out and acquire new information and experiences. The logic follows that in a situation where they need to be creative, they can draw on this store of ideas, experiences, and perspectives to come up with a new solution. People who are not novelty seeking likely have a smaller store of experiences to draw on.

This experiment evaluated people’s product ideas when budget constraints were active (or not). High novelty seekers came up with more creative solutions than low novelty seekers when constraints were present. But novelty seeking didn't make a difference when constraints were absent.

So, when operating within constraints, a store of experience can foster more creative solutions.

A scarcity mindset and ideas

Apart from constraints on a task, in time, or in money, a constraint mindset might have a positive effect on creative product ideas and use.

To see if constraints generalize from thinking to action, researchers in one study had people get into a ‘scarcity’ or ‘abundance’ mindset and then complete tasks that pushed their creativity. 

To establish a particular mindset, participants first spent three minutes either writing an essay about growing up having scarce resources or abundant resources. A third set of participants didn’t write an essay and served as a control.

In one experiment, participants then completed a slightly modified version of the toy design task we talked about earlier. They built a prototype of a new toy idea out of a set of Krinkles building blocks. Their ideas were then rated on novelty and appropriateness. 

The scarcity mindset had a positive effect. Participants who wrote about scarcity came up with more novel toy prototypes than those who wrote about abundance or those control participants who didn’t write an essay. In line with the studies we talked about above, participants’ mindset didn’t have an effect on the appropriateness of their toy ideas.

Further experiments replicated the benefits of a scarcity mindset on problem solving that requires considering atypical uses of objects (the candle problem) and coming up with new uses for an object (what can you do with a brick?).

It seems that constraints don’t have to apply just to the task at hand to have an effect. Thinking of constraints can help us get creative, too.

A little lack

I recently came across the figurative tapestry work of Billie Zangewa, which blew me away. She mostly portrays domestic scenes, and the actions of women in the home and family life as a sort of daily feminism.

The tapestries are made of pieces of silk and constructed at Billie’s kitchen table. She credits her creativity and technique to constraints in the materials she had available to her. As she describes, “My creativity comes from lack - I had to work from scratch - I would never have discovered the technique if I'd been able to buy huge swathes of fabric. A little lack is great for creativity."

A little lack, a lot of time, and a deep well of ideas can bring into being great new things.