Can Constraints Improve Our Creativity?

If you were asked to picture an archetype of an artist, what would you see? Perhaps someone living a free and bohemian life, who spends hours watching clouds rolling by, waiting for the muse to strike? Is artistic inspiration something that arrives on a breeze, or is it something that can be induced?

The romantic idea of the divine nature of artistic inspiration still commonly influences the way artists are perceived today but has very little to do with how most creativity happens. Most of us have jobs and personal commitments that make living a life of artistic freedom impossible. The 2024 CREATe survey of UK visual artists’ earnings and contracts found that 51% have other jobs in order to support their practice, with 46% of those roles being in non-creative fields.

How about instead of seeing these things as frustrating roadblocks, we start to frame those constraints as positive influences on our creativity?

This is not a new idea, during the 90s and the early years of this century, there was a growing belief that creativity is not a “fundamentally mysterious” thing. I am quoting Margaret Boden here, whose work explores the mechanisms behind creativity. The importance of creative thinking was championed by then-new companies such as Google, who adopted the phrase ‘creativity loves constraint’ as an operating principle (Entrepreneurship.org, 2013). This principle was borne out by research. If you are interested in this research, you could look further into Moreau and Dahl’s toy design experiment as written about by Fishman in 2015 or perhaps Sagiv, Arieli, Goldenberg, and Goldschmidt‘s review of a variety of studies in 2010. The findings of these studies were that deliberate restriction is a greater enhancer of creativity than total freedom.

So, how can we use the constraints of our lives to be more creative?

Playfulness within the constraints is key. If you are short of time, then make the time constraint even tighter—set yourself a five-minute timer and make it a game to come up with as many ideas for a project as possible or maybe produce a drawing of the kettle as it boils. When we have longer to create work, we often start to edit while we create, which leads us to doubt ourselves and produce tamer ideas and more tentative lines. A time constraint can give us permission to get the wild ideas out, which sometimes turn out to be not so wild after all!

Perhaps you are short on funding. Can you embrace this challenge as a way to become more creative? I spent many years working as a theatre designer. One of the best shows I created had a budget of £500, had to hitch a lift to Edinburgh in a one-meter-wide space in someone else’s van, and had to be put up and taken down again every day by two people in half an hour. One of the greatest reviews I got was from The Guardian, who said I had made some ‘stunning’ puppets for a show, which had “a really smart symbiosis between the material and personality.” Those materials had been exclusively chosen from what I could find in our local ‘scrap store’ for free.

Perhaps you are frustrated by the amount of demand on your intellect that your other commitments put on you? I have three children and for many years found the amount of my brain that was taken up by motherhood incredibly frustrating, until I decided to reframe this as being an artist in residence in motherhood. I began to observe my own and my children’s existence as an artist, I paid attention to the details, and I began drawing the messes around my house rather than tidying them. Through this I found my current practice as an illustrator. Expertise in other areas will bring diversity to your work and enrich it.

Of course there are some constraints that are beyond playful reframing, but it is always worth trying to find a way. As Virginia Woolf wrote, artworks are not made “in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.” We should, as much as possible, embrace this and use it to our advantage.

Ehlinger, A., Thomas, A., Kretschmer, M., Battisti, M., & Saenz De Juano Ribes, H. (2024). UK Visual Artists: A survey of earnings and contracts.

 Boden, M. (1994) The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms in Respecting the phenomenology of human creativity. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17(3), 551-552, ed Shames, V., & Kihlstrom, J. Cambridge University Press.

Entrepreneurship.org (2013) Marissa Mayer-Creativity loves Constraint. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXvZnKDUdPw.

Fishman, Joseph P. (2015) Creating around Copyright, Harvard Law Review vol. 128, no. 5 : p. 1333-1404.

 Sagiv, L. Arieli, S. Goldenberg, J. Goldschmidt, A. (2010) Structure and freedom in creativity: The interplay between externally imposed structure and personal cognitive style  in Journal of Organizational Behavior, Vol.31(8), pp.1086-1110 John Wiley and Sons, Ltd.

Gillinson, M. (2020) ‘Chester Tuffnut review – woodland puppet drama for little adventurers, The Guardian, 26 March. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/jun/27/chester-tuffnut-review-polka-theatre-play-time.

Woolf, V. (1929). A Room of One’s Own. England: Hogarth Press.