From constraint-driven practice in writing, music, and design (stated by Igor Stravinsky in Poetics of Music, 1942, and made a method by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais's Oulipo, 1960), explained by Patricia D. Stokes (Creativity from Constraints, 2006).
Imposes deliberate limits on materials, words, parts, or time to force focus, rule out weak options, and surface approaches an open brief misses.
When to reach for it
When a brief is so open that the work comes out bland, or the obvious solutions all feel weak.
How it runs
- State the creative challenge.
- List candidate constraints: material, time, format, vocabulary, part count.
- Choose ones that block the easy answers.
- Treat them as fixed, even when the work gets hard.
- Generate within them, then compare against unconstrained work.
Where it sits in SOLVE eX
Go to the source
- Creativity from Constraints: The Psychology of Breakthrough, Springer, 2006
- Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle), 1960
- Poetics of Music (Poétique musicale), Harvard University Press, in French, from the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures of 1939 to 1940; English edition 1947, 1942