DITW 05: Constraints / Everything but Net

Image taken of a basketball hoop without a rim/net in Columbus, OH during Covid

Design in the World is a series of interesting moments and reflections on how design has an impact on making the world easier or harder to navigate.

Sometimes design is more about deleting than adding

Constraints are a form of control that bind what can or cannot be done within a system. On the surface they can be perceived as a bad thing but that is not always the case. In design we can use constraints to set boundaries for creative thinking, which are referred to as creative constraints. We might constrain our ideation or concepting to a specific personas within a specific context (e.g. environment, technology, capabilities, time, regulations, conventions, brand language, budget, etc.). For example, if we are designing kitchenware for professional chefs, there are food-safe regulations with implications for the kind of materials that can be used, and conventions for how kitchenware are understood and used, as well as common kitchen layouts and protocol with their own conventions, all serving as constraints. As people, giving ourselves constraints is a form of self-control, for example- to constrain how much TV we watch in a day or how long we spend time scrolling through social media. Design has the ability not just to impose constraints on abstract things like thinking, but also impose constraint on how tangible things can or cannot be used in the world, sometimes by simply removing a component of a system.

There was an interesting problem that the Short North in Columbus, OH was facing. Apparently people were playing basketball together on a public court when they were supposed to be social distancing, a risk that the city saw which might contribute to the spread of Covid. The solution that the city came up with was to simply remove the net (and rim) from the backboard of basketball hoop- leaving only the backboard on its metal stand. What was once a basketball hoop with the utility for play had its utility deeply constrained by this change, and consequentially people stopped using it. Public tennis courts also had their nets removed as well, causing a similar effect- people were unable to use things the way they expected to or usually would. Naturally, the outcomes from these constraints were that people stopped playing basketball on them.

The things that we add (or don’t add) to product experience make a difference. Each feature that gets added or removed has a chance to impact the greater system in interesting and unexpected ways. Removing or moving one component of a software system to another requires end users to educate themselves on what this change means. As a plus, constraints can be used in design to reduce the complexity of learning something through patterns of progressive disclosure. We intentionally constrain user experience so that product features are slowly disclosed to end users over time, rather than giving them everything at once which can be overwhelming and impact learning experience. This is common in games, for example, where new players are slowly introduced to game features and capabilities, giving them an opportunity to learn how to play rather than overburdening their mental bandwidth with all of the things at once or throwing them into the thick of a situation usually granted to more seasoned players. Constraints can be powerful things when used intentionally, and as a designers they are a tool in our kit to control how things are or can be used.