I bought a cheap DVD player this weekend and here’s what was reinforced to me: constraints catalyze creativity, benefiting users.

At $50 my DVD player wasn’t even the cheapest in the store, but it was a brand that I trusted to reliably play DVDs.

The list of what features my DVD player doesn’t have is easily longer than the list of features it does have. In fact, my new DVD player may be best defined by what it doesn’t do.

Features were stripped away by the manufacturer to get product differentiation across their line of DVD players - offering a low-end option at a price point with attractive margin. Put another way, the desire for a low-cost, high margin product and a differentiated product line introduced constraints into the design process.

You know what? I’m happy for it. Here’s the only thing that I want from my DVD player: the ability to reliably play DVDs.

My DVD player doesn’t even have a clock. Awesome. Did I purchase the DVD player as a solution to my problem about not knowing the time? No. I purchased a watch a year ago for that*. I purchased the DVD player to solve my “inability to be entertained by watching a DVD” problem.

My cheap DVD player has, so far, been exceptionally simple to use. It’s also performed flawlessly at the one task I purchased it for: reliably playing DVDs.

Here’s a great quote pulled from a BusinessWeek article discussing Google’s constrained approach [from the entertaining Ben Barren blog]:

“…you’ll find that some of the most inspiring art forms — haikus, sonatas, religious paintings — are fraught with constraints. They’re beautiful because creativity triumphed over the rules. Constraints shape and focus problems, and provide clear challenges to overcome as well as inspiration. Creativity, in fact, thrives best when constrained. Yet constraints must be balanced with a healthy disregard for the impossible. Disregarding the bounds of what we know or what we accept gives rise to ideas that are nonobvious, unconventional, or simply unexplored. The creativity realized in this balance between constraint and disregard for the impossible are fueled by passion and result in revolutionary change.” “

*Note: it’s also a very simple watch that does two things: tell me the time and tell me how long I’ve been running for. This simple watched solved two problems without introducing additional and unnecessary complexity: (1) my problem about not knowing the time; (2) my problem about not knowing how long I’ve been running for.

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