Reading Response #1

to Artful Design • Chapter 3: “Visual Design”

Oluseyi O.

10/15/2023

Music 256A / CS476a, Stanford University

Reading Response: Constraints and when to Break Them

From this week’s reading, I’d like to mainly respond to Principle 3.13 and Principle 3.14, which state “Invent artificial constraints” and “Savor Strange Design Loops” respectively. Before that though, I would also like to bring up Principle 3.16, which states “Originality is Recombination”.

One of my hobbies is playing tabletop roleplaying games such as Dungeons and Dragons. I frequently play the role of the Game Master, meaning I have to design the scenarios the players play through and the world they take place in. When doing so, I find myself frequently borrowing and taking ideas from all the media I consume to blend together into my own world. I’ve always found blending one fun concept with another from an entirely different source leads to fun results, and I think that it truly epitomizes the idea of “Originality is Recombination”. I’m someone who says that there is no truly original idea out there anymore and that what matters is the execution of those ideas, but I may amend that statement to include this principle.

I think artificial constraints and strange design loops work well together in conjunction. Namely, I believe that some of the best strange design loop concepts shown in the chapter played on the idea of breaking some sort of unspoken rule about the medium, a constraint if you will. For example, “Song That Never Ends” breaks a constraint many songwriters write with: namely, that the song will end. Magritte’s “The Treachery of Images” brings up an aspect about pictures that most artists choose not to consider, the fact that what they are drawing inherently is just a picture and not the real object. It feels like a taboo of sorts; like it’s breaking some fundamental rule that we must stick to to preserve our sense of reality. In other words, I wonder if a good way to design these types of strange loops would be to first place down artificial constraints on the design as the book suggests, and then consider one small, subtle way to break that constraint. I think there is an elegance to this and restraint has to be practiced, the constraint has to be really set in stone throughout the rest of the work and imbued into it for breaking it to have the significant impact you would want out of a strange loop. In the two earlier examples, the constraint comes more from popular culture and how we view songs and pictures as humans rather than something the artists had to work to establish. Playing on these types of constraints are easier for strange loops and require less setup, but I believe there is merit to exploring setting up your own consistency and constraints within a design and then breaking it in one subtle way to create the strange loop effect.