I find this to be a fascinating, thought-provoking post.  I love the images of Messer's work--but I struggle a little to see the natural variations in the wood as constraints.  They seem more like opportunities.  Makes me wonder: Where's the line between constraint and opportunity? Some constraints are more...constraining. I also love the Stravinsky quote. I entirely agree with the second sentence of the quote; the first sentence gives me more pause.  It's counter-intuitive: Are more constraints actually more freeing than fewer constraints?  Maybe, psychologically, you get to a point of "oh well, this is just so limited, I might as well jump in here and see what I can make out of this small space." It's also seems to me that Stravinsky is talking about constraints one imposes on oneself (although it's a little ambiguous). Self-imposed constraint would have a different impact than constraints imposed by an outside force. I'm thinking about my students and what would give them a sense of creative license, a freedom to do something unique and individual with their work for class. I think if I could find a way for them to select and apply their own constraints, it would be more freeing than a more typical class assignment (full of teacher-constructed constraints).

- Cheryl Smith

I like the perspective of opportunities as opposed to constraints, Cheryl!

The hardest of technologies that involve a human component, such as machine operating procedures, stop creativity altogether - the results of creativity in such circumstances tend to be things like blown-up nuclear reactors and other kinds of broken machinery. Most things we do in education tend to be softer than that, though I have often sat through lessons that involved precise copying, and assessments that involve filling in the blanks. It's not a bad thing though as, on many occasions, that really is a very good way to learn. Learning a musical instrument, for instance, greatly benefits from (mindful) repetition until you get it right: only once you have taught your fingers/lungs/lips/whatever to play are you able to move on to be more creative. Similarly, once you have got that far, the 12-bar blues format can provide a framework for a wealth of creative music and it (and variations on it) forms the basis of many of the greatest songs of the past 100 years. And, of course, counterpoint, a highly mechanical and constraining musical technology, provided us with some of the most beautiful music ever written.  The same is true of creating learning experiences. Despite their almost total lack of empirical foundation, when I'm lost for an idea I'll quite regularly invoke Kolb/Lewin's learning cycle or Curt Bonk's R2D2 model to give me something to kick against, for instance. They are fairly arbitrary constraints, but they can be quite helpful. All of which emphasises the big point here that it ain't what you do it's the way that you do it!