Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Everyone who participates in an artistic endeavor, be they playwrights, ac-
tors, visual artists, or human agents, exercises creativity. One of the most
vital contributions of structure is its role in
constraining
the creative pro-
cess. The relationship between creativity and constraints is mysterious and
symbiotic. In multi-interactor forms, social relations among interactors can
create powerful constraints on the actions of individual players—in-world,
through VOIP, or in dedicated Blogs, for example.
Constraints—limitations on people's actions—may be expressed as any-
thing from gentle suggestions to stringent rules, or they may only be sub-
consciously sensed as intrinsic aspects of the thing that one is trying to do
or be or create. People are always operating under some set of constraints:
the physical limitations of survival (air to breathe, food, and water); the
constraints of language on verbal expression; the limitations of social ac-
ceptability in public situations (e.g., wearing clothes, usually). The ability to
act without any such constraints is the stuff of dreams—the power of fl ight,
for instance, or the appeal of immortality. Yet even such fantasy powers can
be lost by the failure to comply with other, albeit mythical, constraints (wit-
ness Prometheus). It is diffi cult to imagine life, even a fantasy life, in the
absence of any constraints at all. Good designers are more likely to argue
for than against constraints on their own work; constraints give us things to
push against and may call up our highest creativity.
People engaged in designing and participating in human-computer interac-
tion are subject to some special kinds of constraints. Some constraints arise
from the technical capabilities and limitations of the programming environ-
ment and the delivery system: If the system has no speech processing capa-
bility, for instance, people may be constrained to employ the keyboard for
verbal input, and further constrained by its vicissitudes—the “QWERTY”
layout, for example, and the presence or absence of function keys. Other
constraints arise from the nature of the activity as it is comprehended by
the system. What one can do in a given application environment such as a
document creation program, photo editing program, or computer game is
but a subset of all that one might be able to do with one's computer.
The design of human-computer interaction should be informed by an
analysis of constraints to determine what kinds of constraints are most ap-
