Great Designs Optimize the Scarcest Resource
Understanding the constraints in any given context is fundamental to good design. Indeed, some define design as the ability to simultaneously satisfy multiple constraints. Design is a constraint satisfaction problem.
Constraints come from the client as needs and requirements, the government as rules and regulations and nature as laws and events. Some say the more constraints you have the fewer options you have as a designer. This is logical but seems to make assumptions on the limits of creativity. Perhaps we should say, the more constraints you have the more expertise and creativity you need to generate options.
Fred Brooks is a master thinker about the nature of constraints. Outside of computer science he is most famous for his book The Mythical Man-Month. In this book he reveals a fundamental constraint – after a given point, adding additional resources (e.g. people) to a task does not accelerate the work. Indeed, at some point the more you add the slower the work goes because complexity and coordination costs increase. There are many popularizations of Brook’s law – nine women cannot make a baby in a month, you cannot solve a problem by throwing money at it and so on.
Fred Brooks continues to emphasize the importance of constraints in his new book The Design of Design. A key theme - design by discovering your scarcest resource and generate a solution that optimizes for it. You can get a taste for this in an interview he gave to Wired (August 2010 edition not yet available online):
“The critical thing about the design process is to identify your scarcest resource. Despite what you may think, that very often is not money. For example, in a NASA moon shot, money is abundant but lightness is scarce; every ounce of weight requires tons of material below. On the design of a beach vacation home, the limitation may be your ocean-front footage. You have to make sure your whole team understands what scarce resource you’re optimizing.”
Strongly suggest wading through the 448 pages of the book to any serious student of design. Another key theme is that there are invariants across different mediums or fields of design. Identify those and we can factor in lessons across design disciplines. It is a different type of read than your typical book on design. It is written by one of our deepest design thinkers.
The idea that great designs optimize the scarcest resource has some interesting implications for understanding cognitive design. In many situations attention and more broadly mental energy will always be the scarcest resource we have. Look first the workflow between the ears for your scarcest resource.
