Currently in Glasgow for the International Conference on Design Creativity, at which Michael Biskjaer and I have just given a talk about our paper Toward A Constraint-Oriented Pragmatist Understanding Of Design Creativity (PDF). The paper explores the potentials of pragmatist philosophy to enrich the discourse on design creativity in general and the concept of constraints specifically. We argue that pragmatism can inspire and inform the study of constraints in design creativity by offering a coherent and well-developed frame of understanding how designerly inquiry unfolds as a complex interplay between the designer and the resources at hand in the situation, which may continuously alternate between constraining and enabling roles, or even take on both roles simultaneously.
The slides from our talk are embedded below: