– “Artistry and structure are interdependent; both must be present if beauty is to be the result.” Please elaborate on this quote as you understand it from the reading.-

– “One of the most vital contributions of structure is its role in constraining the creative process.” What does Brenda Laurel mean by this?

– What are explicit constraints and implicit constraints. Please give examples from your own field as related to an interaction (of any kind).

Constraints are crucial in the creative process. A good designer knows how to yield the best work within the constraints. Structure brings constraints, which push the boundary of creativity. For example, in my Junior year, we were given design brief to design for MTA subway station. The brief here served as a major constraint, which means that the installation is site specific, and the installation can only be installed in subway station rather than on the train or on the street. And the affordances of the subway station also gave us constraints of space, time, passenger flow, etc,. In this case, from my understanding, artistry refers to the installation alone we designed rather than how adequate it was for the context. The beautiful thing for us was to design an beautiful interactive installation that would not disrupt the passenger flow but brighten people’s mood within one week without exceeding the budget. The beautiful interactive installation concerns with artistry. Space, environment, time, money and so on are our constraints.Because of those constraints, we were able to find a right direction. After all, what are we designing for if there were no constraint?

Moreover, this relationship of structure and designer is like the relationship of structure and agency in Sociology. In Sociology, structure refers to the complex and interconnected set of social forces such as the law and norms, institutions, and elements of life beyond the individual control that work together to shape people’s thought, behavior, experiences, and choices — a set of constraints including budget, target audience, technical constraints and so on in creative process. Agency is the capacity of individuals to act independent of structure and to make their own free choices — the artist choices of designers or other creativity workers. By being aware of the structure we are facing, we are able to enact our agency as individual to figure out how much potential we have to achieve something and fight for something that we want.

Explicit constraints are direct and straightforward. Implicit constraints need to be inferred by interactors. In the case of our subway installation project, the explicit constraints would be the affordances of the space. Our design was to make the installation on the ceiling, which makes the installation unreachable. The lighting of the installation is changed according to the volume, position, and movement of passengers. One would not know how to interact with the installation unless she physically interact with it and finds out the rules, which sets implicit constraints to interactors.