At a recent team meeting, a few of us wondered what we would do if we won the $1.25 billion (BILLION with a B) Mega-Millions jackpot. And here’s the funny thing – not even one of us could come up with anything – we couldn’t wrap our heads around the almost limitless possibilities and the lack of constraints that amount of money could provide us with. (I know, give us a day—or five—and I’m sure we’d come up with SOMETHING, but it was clear it wouldn’t be easy.) We all professed to feel overwhelmed at even knowing where to start.

Our collective inability to wrap our heads around this circumstance caused me to reflect on the power of constraints and to recall the following quote from the architect and designer Frank Lloyd Wright:

“The human race built most nobly when limitations were greatest and, therefore, when the most was required of imagination in order to build at all.”

Frank Lloyd Wright

The Power of Constraints

This quote has always made intuitive sense to me, but I wanted to know if there was any research to support it. A search revealed several studies, including one published in 2019 in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) entitled: “Why Constraints Are Good for Innovation” (Acar, Tarakci, and van Knippenberg). Here are a few of the critical takeaways suggested by their research:

• When there are no constraints on the creative process, complacency sets in, and people follow what psychologists call the path of least resistance – they go for the most intuitive idea that comes to mind rather than investing in developing a better one.

• Constraints, in contrast, provide focus and a creative challenge that motivates people to search for and connect information from different sources to general novel ideas.

When designing health and healthcare data dashboards, infographics, and applications, we are familiar with constraints imposed upon us, factors we can’t control like:

• Government and regulatory requirements
• Non-negotiable budgets
• Deadlines

We can view these externally imposed constraints as obstructions or frame them as a guiding framework and motivating challenges requiring innovative solutions. 

Additionally, when a project does not have these types of constraints, we can set boundaries for ourselves by establishing categories of “must-have” versus “nice to have” things such as:

• Data and calculated metrics to be displayed
• Simple vs. complex analytics
• Interactivity and functionality
• Design elements (e.g., colors, fonts, accessibility)

The HBR study also recommends that we consider the project’s characteristics when determining the types of constraints that will be most motivating. For example, the study suggests the more a project requires input from interdisciplinary teams and seeks innovations that break away from the current solution, the more it will benefit from:

• Relaxing input and output constraints,
• while clearly defining the process to govern communication and coordination.

This approach encourages many wide-ranging ideas and imagining in an organized, process-driven manner, which results in new ideas and innovation and (importantly) an achievable result.

In contrast, when the focus is on producing more modest innovations to an existing solution, the project team can be more successful when:

• The modification boundaries (inputs and outputs) are well-defined
• There is an aggressive timeline and budget

In other words, the sky is not the limit for these projects; we only need to achieve incremental modifications and improvements.

Limitations Open Creative Pathways

Here’s the bottom line. Instead of being paralyzed or railing against constraints, we can reframe them to spark our creativity. We can use their limits and demands as potent fuel for direction and inspiration. As counterintuitive as it may seem, innovation comes from a world of contradiction, irony, and paradox. In fact, the key is having a frame of mind that views constraints not simply as obstacles in our path but rather as a spark to finding new and clever solutions to designing beautiful and valuable health and healthcare data visualizations.

Want More?

To read more about the importance and impact of constraints on designing dashboards and reports, check out Lindsay Betzendahl’s post on how constraints can make you a better designer.