Creativity needs limits
Have you ever played that game - the one where you write names of film/book characters and famous people on small pieces of paper and then take it in turns to pick them out of a hat? The challenge is to help your team guess who you picked out without using their name.
The first round is a bit like charades - as long as you don’t mention the name, you can describe them any which way you like. But it’s in the next two rounds that things get really fun and interesting. In Round 2, you must describe the person or character using just one word - hard - but harder still is Round 3 when no words are allowed and you can only mime your one clue. The truly amazing, and therefore enjoyable, often hilarious, aspect of this parlour game is the single word and mime that become associated with each character or celebrity. It reveals, often hidden, often comic, genius to creatively communicate a message to other people.
With limits placed upon us, we become extraordinarily creative at communicating with others. With constraints around what we can or cannot say and do, we have to distil the message in its purest form - the one word, or action, that tells another person exactly who or what it is you are talking about.
Given no word count by an editor, a journalist could, and would, ramble on infinitely. With a word limit, they must sift all the information they have gathered and include in their article only what is really necessary or relevant to the story they are telling.
A designer may dream of the client who announces, “Do whatever you like.” But having no limits placed on us is not the dream come true we might think, as it provides no clear starting point, no clear end.
By being forced to work within certain parameters, we are forced to pare everything back to the bare bones - to get to the nub of the matter. And this is where our creativity can really start to flourish - this is the creative communication challenge we have all waiting for.
PS. My favourite guess ever was of a famous female politician, who became associated with the word ‘mad’ - the mime was truly brilliant!
This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 27th, 2010 at 3:22 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
