Posted by Constraints: Kryptonite or Door to Creative Innovation?
In my work creating data visualizations, I often hear designers complain that constraints are their kryptonite or, perhaps worse, a barbed wire prison fence around their creative freedom. But if we change our thinking, constraints can be the inspiration to break out of old habits, experiment, and try new things in search of innovative, workable solutions.
Data visualization designers and developer regularly face a few common design constraints including but not limited to:
- Client constraints
- Functional constraints
- Style constraints
Client Constraints
Clients and stakeholders impose constraints that inform a project’s scope and determine what can and cannot be achieved. These may be related to budget – “We only have the budget for one dashboard.” – or deadlines – “I have a board meeting at the end of the month and this dashboard is a top priority.”
Client constraints challenge us to prioritize our ideas, focus more directly on data visualization best practices, and identifying viable and accessible resources to achieve our designs. Without client constraints we are likely to spiral into a sea of endless possibilities – traveling down the rabbit-hole of dreaming up complicated, but likely unnecessary solutions, and miss the mark entirely.
It is of paramount importance that when faced with these types of constraints that we have a candid conversation with stakeholders about what can reasonably be achieved.
These conversations must be grounded in gathering information and requirements like…
Want to learn more?
Check out my most recent blog post on HealthDataViz’s new blog that goes into more detail about this topic and provides real examples on how these constraints actually impacted my design choices and forced me to think outside of the box.
More to Come
I will continue to post here (hopefully more regularly!) but I wanted to be sure to share this post because, as many of you know, design in data visualization is super important to me and I didn’t want any of you lovely people to miss this post! Please go check it out.
As always, cheers!
Lindsay
Viz Zen Data 