The Tools That Dream For You: How Invisible Constraints Quietly Shape Your Creativity

The first thing you notice is the silence.

Not the romantic, cinematic kind of silence where someone hits “record” and everyone holds their breath, but the heavy, stale silence of a room full of possibility that has somehow turned into a trap.

It’s almost midnight in a small recording studio. The singer is slumped on the couch scrolling her phone. The producer stares at three glowing screens. On one, a grid of tiny colored rectangles—dozens of vocal takes, synth lines, drum samples. On another, a library of more than 200 plugins: compressors, reverbs, saturation effects, vintage tape emulations, AI mastering assistants. On the third, a blank Google Doc labeled “Lyrics v17 FINAL final”.

The track isn’t working. Everyone can feel it, though no one wants to say it again.

“We could try a different drum kit,” the singer suggests, without much conviction.

The producer nods. His mouse hovers over an endless scrollable list: 808 Punch Kit, Analog Warmth Kit, Neon Trap Kit, HyperPop Chaos Kit, AI-Recomposed Drums (Beta).

He could swap out the snare. Or stack three snares. Or feed the snare into a granular delay that syncs to the song’s tempo and then resample it as a pad. He could import one of the 700 presets that came with his most recent software update. Or he could open the marketplace and buy new sounds, because maybe the magic is in the expansion pack he doesn’t own yet.

Instead he just sits there, eyes flicking between options, feeling his brain slowly melt into the blue light.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, a traitorous thought arises: how did people ever make great music with four tracks and a tape machine?

He thinks of images he’s seen of the Beatles at Abbey Road: tape spools, faders you can push with your whole palm, physical constraints everywhere. No undo button. No infinite scroll of snare samples. No AI drummer waiting obediently in the sidebar.

Just tape, time, and a limited number of decisions.

He looks back at his screen, crammed with options, and feels a weird, shameful longing for fewer choices.

We like to tell ourselves a certain story about creativity. Give a talented person total freedom—a blank page, an open field, a powerful computer with all the right tools—and their imagination will soar. No limits. No constraints. Just pure possibility.

And yet, if you’ve ever sat paralyzed in front of an empty document, or scrolled past a thousand half-finished sketches, or watched a simple project dissolve into a swamp of options, you know that this story doesn’t quite match lived reality.

The producer in that studio is not suffering from a lack of tools. He’s suffering from too many—and from the invisible ways those tools are shaping what he can even imagine making.

We think we use tools to create. But more often than we notice, the tools are also quietly creating us.

The invisible opinions of your tools

A Canadian media theorist, Marshall McLuhan, liked to say that “the medium is the message.” He meant that every tool, every medium—from television to the smartphone—does more than carry content. It rearranges what’s easy and what’s hard, what feels natural and what feels strange, what we notice and what we ignore. (en.wikipedia.org)

A painter in oils doesn’t just express ideas on canvas; the viscosity of the paint, the drying time, the size of the brushstrokes all nudge her towards certain kinds of images. A photographer with 36 shots on a roll of film walks through the world differently than someone with a 128GB card and burst mode. A songwriter limited to three chords and two minutes writes different songs than someone staring at an infinite piano roll.

Tools are not neutral. They come with opinions.

Modern cognitive science goes further. In the “extended mind” thesis, philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers argued that our minds don’t stop at the skull. When you think with a notebook, or shuffle Post-it notes on a wall, or drag rectangles around a screen, those external objects are not just containers for thoughts; they become part of the thinking process itself. (en.wikipedia.org)

Annie Murphy Paul, in her book The Extended Mind, pulls together decades of research showing how our bodies, our physical spaces, and our tools can expand or shrink our ability to think and create. She describes, for instance, how simply laying ideas out on large boards or walls—rather than keeping them hidden in a laptop—can dramatically change how deeply we grasp complex material, because we’re harnessing spatial memory and embodied navigation rather than just abstract rumination. (anniemurphypaul.com)

If you’ve ever felt that you “think better on paper,” or in front of a whiteboard, or on a walk with a notebook, that’s the extended mind in action. You are literally smarter in some configurations of body + environment + tools than in others.

Now combine McLuhan’s insight with the extended mind.

If our tools shape not just what we produce but how we think; if they become, in a very real cognitive sense, part of our minds—then the tools we choose are silently editing our creative possibilities.

They are a kind of invisible co-author.

The presets you live inside

Consider Auto-Tune.

When Antares released the software in 1997, it was meant as a corrective tool—to subtly nudge off-pitch vocals into tune. Within a year, Cher’s producers had pushed its settings far beyond subtle for her single “Believe,” creating that now-familiar robotic swoop between notes. At the time it was so strange they lied and claimed it was a vocoder. (en.wikipedia.org)

What started as a behind-the-scenes fix became, very quickly, an aesthetic.

T-Pain built a whole sound around extreme Auto-Tune, transforming late-2000s R&B and hip-hop. Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak processed vulnerability and grief through that shimmering digital filter. Once the tool was widely available, it didn’t just correct mistakes. It changed what “good” even sounded like. It taught an entire generation of listeners’ ears—and aspiring singers’ throats—new expectations of the voice.

At some point, Auto-Tune stopped being a knob in the background and became part of the default mental palette of popular music. That’s what McLuhan meant: the medium quietly becomes the message.

Or think about Instagram.

The app launched with a small set of filters that mimicked certain analog film looks: warm tones, vignettes, faded colors, increased contrast. Along with the square crop, those filters created a recognizable mood: nostalgic, curated, a little bit cinematic.

Media scholar Lev Manovich coined the term “Instagramism” for the distinct visual culture that grew around this platform. His research lab analyzed millions of Instagram photos from cities around the world and found a pattern: a clean, minimalist, carefully designed style of shooting and editing, quite different from either old family snapshots or formal art photography. (espes.ff.unipo.sk)

The sheer simplicity of adding a filter made it easier to produce a certain aesthetic than to develop your own from scratch. For photography students born into the digital era, Manovich notes, Instagram—not museums or books—became the primary reference for “what good looks like.”

A free, convenient, one-tap tool won the fight for the global eye.

Even if you never use the filters yourself, if you spend enough time in that visual environment, it will shape what you think a “nice” photo is. The tool is dreaming for you.

Retouching software does something even more intimate. PortraitPro, for example, lets you slim faces, whiten teeth, clear skin, and enlarge eyes with a few sliders. (en.wikipedia.org) Neural tools like INRetouch can learn a photographer’s entire editing style from before-and-after pairs, then apply it automatically to new images. (arxiv.org)

On social media, face-beautifying filters go further, smoothing skin, narrowing noses, and lightening complexions in real time. Studies of Instagram filters find that frequent use of these “beautifying” lenses predicts lower self-esteem and higher acceptance of cosmetic surgery among young women. (revistas.javeriana.edu.co) A filter is not just an overlay; it’s a proposed answer to the question: “What should I look like?” And if you see that answer on your face a thousand times, it becomes harder to imagine other ones.

All of this is creativity. Designing a vocal “Cher effect,” constructing a square-filtered aesthetic, engineering a set of facial tweaks that make people go “wow” when they see themselves—these are creative acts.

But once the tools exist and spread, they also start unconsciously standardizing creativity. They make a certain kind of choice frictionless, so we make it without thinking. They bury other choices behind effort, so we rarely go there.

It’s not that you can’t make weird, raw, off-key, unfiltered, asymmetrical work in 2025. You can. It’s that the path of least resistance increasingly runs through templates someone else designed.

And those templates live not just in your apps, but in your head.

When constraints make you more creative

Here’s where the story gets interesting.

If tools with too many built-in assumptions can stunt creativity, you might think the answer is to strip things down to the bare minimum. No filters, no presets, no templates. Just the raw medium and your imagination.

That romantic notion—total freedom equals maximal creativity—is deeply ingrained. It’s also, mostly, wrong.

Across multiple fields, a curious pattern keeps showing up in the research on creativity: people tend to be more creative when they’re operating within the right kind of constraints.

In a large review titled “Creativity and Innovation Under Constraints,” management scholars Oguz Acar and colleagues examined how limitations like rules, regulations, deadlines, and scarce resources affect idea generation and innovation. Their conclusion wasn’t the simplistic “constraints are good” or “constraints are bad.” Instead, they found that constraints can enhance or crush creativity depending on their type and intensity. The key is how they channel attention and effort. (pure.eur.nl)

In consumer research, one study looked at what happens when people are asked to design their own product—like assembling ingredients for a custom snack mix—under different conditions. When the researchers limited the inputs (for example, fewer kinds of ingredients to choose from) but didn’t slam participants with tight time pressure, people actually produced more original combinations. The constraint forced them to process information more deeply rather than skimming through an overwhelming buffet of choices. (academic.oup.com)

Design educators have found something similar with mood boards. In a 2026 study, novice designers were given mood boards with either low, medium, or high constraints—ranging from extremely open-ended to very tightly specified. The groups who worked with moderately constrained boards produced the most creative sketches: more novel, more varied, more numerous. Too few constraints, and beginners get lost. Too many, and they become rigid. There’s a “sweet spot” where the box is tight enough to push you but loose enough to move around in. (sciencedirect.com)

Ten years of data from an online innovation community—tens of thousands of designs submitted to different contests—tell a complementary story. When the contests were creatively constrained (clear brief, thematic limitations) and the platform relaxed its technical constraints (making it easier to submit, experiment, and iterate), contributors learned more and explored the design space more effectively. Creative constraints drove focus; reduced technical friction made exploration cheap. (arxiv.org)

Even tools intended to support creativity, like digital brainstorming platforms, seem to work better when they incorporate thoughtfully chosen limits. A recent paper on creativity support systems suggests that “less is sometimes more”: by introducing constraint-based design principles—limiting features, simplifying options, structuring collaboration—these systems can actually increase both virtual team creativity and satisfaction, in part by reducing technological overload. (sciencedirect.com)

Taken together, these findings point to something that’s both counterintuitive and, once you feel it in your own life, obvious:

Constraints are not the opposite of creativity. They are one of its main engines.

Total freedom is often paralyzing. Total restriction is deadening. The art is in designing, or recognizing, the right constraints—the ones that act more like a climbing harness than a straitjacket.

Which brings us back to tools.

Every creative tool you use—a camera app, a writing program, a design system, a generative AI model—embeds a set of constraints. Some are explicit (only vertical video, only 15 seconds, this many characters). Others are implicit (which features are easy, what the defaults are, what kinds of outputs the tool pushes you towards).

The question is not whether you’ll create under constraints. You will. The question is whether you’ll notice them, and whether you’ll choose them deliberately—or let someone else’s product decisions quietly shape your imagination.

When the AI starts dreaming first

Generative AI is the latest tool promising to “set your creativity free.”

Type a prompt, get logo ideas. Feed a sketch to an image model, get dozens of variations. Ask a language model for plot twists or product concepts, and you’re showered in suggestions.

On its face, this looks like an expansion of possibility. You’re no longer limited to what you can sketch or code or verbalize yourself. You have a tireless creative partner.

But here again, the medium has a message.

A recent experiment with an AI image generator looked at how using AI during a visual ideation task affected human designers’ performance. Participants were split into groups; some got AI support, others worked without it. Designers who used the AI tended to fixate on the AI’s initial suggestions. They produced fewer ideas, with less variety and originality, than those who worked unaided. (arxiv.org)

It wasn’t that the AI was bad at generating attractive images. In some ways, that was the problem. The first few outputs were often polished enough to feel “good enough,” narrowing what designers saw as the space of possibilities. Once you see something that looks like a finished answer, it becomes harder to imagine truly different answers.

Other research into Photoshop’s new Generative Fill feature—where you can select part of an image and ask the AI to generate content to fill that space—found a similar tension. Professional creatives appreciated how the tool accelerated fiddly tasks and lowered barriers to trying visual ideas. But many also worried that over-reliance on it could blur the line between their own hard-won style and the algorithm’s biases, eroding the role of lived experience and pride in craft. (arxiv.org)

If earlier tools like Auto-Tune or Instagram filters nudged creative work into particular grooves, generative models take one more step: they propose the grooves for you by default.

They don’t merely correct your talent; they anticipate it.

Left unexamined, this can foster a new kind of creative laziness—not the laziness of not working, but the laziness of outsourcing imagination itself. You ask for “a logo for a sustainable coffee brand,” the model gives you a leaf in a cup, and suddenly your mental picture of “what a sustainable coffee logo looks like” collapses into something narrower than before.

In theory, you could push beyond the first outputs, engineer prompts that truly twist conventions, combine models, chain iterations, and so on. In practice, most of us ride the autocomplete.

This is not a moral failing. It’s how human attention works.

Each suggestion saves you time and cognitive load. The cost of accepting the suggestion is near-zero. The cost of resisting it—to laboriously conjure alternatives from scratch—is high and very visible. Over thousands of micro-decisions, the gradient is clear: go with the flow.

After a while, the system doesn’t just respond to your creativity. It begins to define its contours.

Again, the point isn’t that AI is “bad” for creativity. Like every tool in this essay, its effect depends on the constraints you wrap around it.

If you treat a model as a searchlight you point into the unknown—but like any searchlight, only in certain directions at a time—it can reveal corners of the design space you’d never discover alone. If you treat it as an oracle, it will quietly narrow your field of view to what it’s already seen.

So we’re back to that climbing harness.

How do you choose constraints—and tools—that actually help you climb higher?

Three studios, three minds

Imagine three different creative studios.

In the first, a graphic designer works entirely in a popular web-based design app. Every project starts from the same curated library of templates with modern color palettes, grids, and components. There’s an official design system built in. Everything snaps satisfyingly into place. It’s almost impossible to make something that looks bad in a superficial way. It’s also oddly hard to make something that doesn’t look like everything else.

In the second, an illustrator sits at a big wooden desk with a messy stack of cheap printer paper, a set of fineliners, and two or three brush pens. She sketches ideas by hand until she fills the desk. She tries to match the loose energy of those sketches later, when she scans and polishes them in software, but she knows the software makes it way too easy to overrefine lines, to polish the life out of them. So she deliberately keeps the digital part of the process short and somewhat clumsy.

In the third, a UX team has whiteboards covering every wall. When they start a new product feature, the rule is: no screens for the first day. They sketch interfaces with fat markers that don’t allow detail. They storyboard a user’s experience in six panels on index cards. Only after they’ve argued in front of these crude diagrams do they open Figma and start translating.

All three are using modern tools. All three are creating within constraints. The difference is where the constraints live.

In the first studio, the constraints are mostly implicit in the software. The app pushes towards a certain “correct” look: certain spacings, shadows, corner radii. That’s great for consistency and speed, and terrible for distinctive voice.

In the second, the illustrator imposes constraints on materials and process. The cheap paper gives her permission to be messy. The limited pens force her to work with line and contrast rather than relying on digital tricks. The friction of scanning and cleaning up puts a natural cap on over-editing.

In the third, the team constrains the level of fidelity and the timing of different tools. They know that high-fidelity digital comps early on make people fall in love with surface details and resist structural changes. To protect deep thinking, they push the polished tools later in the flow.

All three studios “extend the mind” into the environment. The difference is how consciously they’re doing it.

Cognitive scientists call one of these strategies “cognitive offloading”: using external representations—diagrams, objects, notes—to free up mental resources and think more effectively. (theinformed.life) But offloading isn’t automatically beneficial. It matters what you offload and where you offload it to.

If you offload all your early ideas into a slick, high-fidelity mockup tool, you’re likely to think in terms of pixels, not concepts. If you offload them into thick markers on butcher paper, you’re more likely to think in terms of big shapes and flows.

If you externalize everything into a Kanban board crammed with tiny tickets, you may feel productive but lose track of the overall story. If you cover a wall with a handful of large index cards, each containing a major theme, your mind will naturally see patterns and gaps differently.

The environment and the tool are not a neutral staging area for your creativity. They are the primary medium your creativity swims in.

And as McLuhan would remind us, the medium is already whispering instructions.

The sweet spot: when tools limit the right things

If constraints can both fuel and kill creativity, what separates the useful ones from the suffocating ones?

The emerging research suggests a few patterns.

First, useful constraints narrow some dimensions while leaving others open.

A mood board with moderate constraints might specify a color palette and a general mood (“calm, minimalist, natural materials”) but leave composition and typography wide open. That appears to push novice designers to explore within a clear frame rather than flail in chaos or mechanically follow instruction. (sciencedirect.com)

In product customization, limiting how many input elements consumers can choose from encourages them to recombine those elements more inventively—as long as they’re not simultaneously slammed with severe time pressure. When both inputs and time are tightly constrained, creativity drops; people revert to safe choices. (academic.oup.com)

In online innovation platforms, creative constraints in the brief (you must design a lamp that folds flat for shipping, or a shoe made only from recyclable materials) seem to foster exploration and learning, but only when technical constraints—like file format restrictions and clunky submission processes—are relaxed. When everything is hard, people don’t push as far. (arxiv.org)

Second, useful constraints are legible. You know what they are.

When product designers in a recent study were interviewed about working under brand guidelines and industry standards, researchers found three broad “personas”: some designers saw constraints as creative friends, others as enemies, and some as neutral facts. Tools designed to support creativity under constraints, in turn, worked best when they responded to those attitudes—surfacing constraints clearly, allowing designers to flex them where appropriate, and sparking variations within them—rather than hard-coding rules in opaque ways. (arxiv.org)

Third, useful constraints protect intrinsic motivation—that sense of working for the joy or meaning of the task itself—rather than reducing creativity to compliance.

Teresa Amabile’s long-running research on creativity at work found that people’s best ideas tended to arise when they felt internally motivated and had some autonomy, even under real-world limits like deadlines. When constraints were perceived as controlling (“do this or else”), creativity withered; when they were framed as meaningful challenges (“how might we do this within these budget/time/resource limits?”), creativity flourished. (en.wikipedia.org)

Put differently: constraints help when they feel like interesting problems and hurt when they feel like pointless cages.

One way to tell the difference in your own projects is to ask: Does this constraint give me a question that’s fun to wrestle with?

“Write a short story” is vague. “Write a story in which nothing happens, but something changes” is a constraint. You can feel your brain begin to work on it.

“Design a logo” is vague. “Design a black-and-white logo that works at 16x16 pixels and 16x16 feet” is a constraint. It invites tradeoffs, tensions, inventive compromises.

“Come up with a startup idea” is vague and intimidating. “Come up with a service that solves one annoying problem for cyclists on your commute, without using a smartphone app” is a constraint. It’s still hard, but your attention has a foothold.

The psychologist Patricia Stokes, in Creativity from Constraints, argued that many breakthrough artists—from Mondrian to the fashion designer Rei Kawakubo—intentionally imposed tight structural limitations on themselves, then explored variations inside them. The constraint became an engine for style. (overdrive.com)

This is worlds away from the sensation our overwhelmed music producer felt in that first scene: a void masquerading as openness.

Total freedom is not actually free. It taxes every part of your attention. Thoughtful constraints, by contrast, spend some freedom on your behalf—so that you can invest what remains more deeply.

The tools that dream for you—and how to choose them

If tools are constraints in disguise, and constraints partly determine what we can imagine, then “choosing a tool” is a much bigger decision than it looks on a procurement spreadsheet.

When you adopt a design system, you are adopting not just a set of components, but a worldview about what an interface is. When you move your writing from a messy notebook into a clean document editor with red underlines and word counts in the corner, you’re not just swapping paper for pixels. You’re changing which part of your brain you’re asking to show up.

Here are a few lenses—less like tips, more like questions—to examine your own creative environment through.

What is this tool optimizing for?

Some tools are optimized for speed and standardization. They make it trivial to produce something that looks like the average of what everyone else is doing. (Think of slideshow templates, stock music, corporate email signatures.)

Other tools are optimized for exploration and play. They make it cheap to try weird combinations, to branch and fork and undo. They often have fewer polished templates, more raw primitives.

Still others are optimized for polish and control. They let you tweak every curve and shadow, but they demand attention and time.

None of these are inherently good or bad. The danger is using a speed-and-standardization tool in the early phase of a project that desperately needs exploration, or drowning in polish sliders when what you need is to rough out the shape.

Ask yourself: At this stage of the work, what should be easy and what should be hard? Then choose tools whose internal biases match that answer.

If you’re brainstorming concepts, anything that looks too slick too early is a risk. If you’re about to ship something to millions of users, tools that enforce consistency and alignment are your friend. The constraint to respect is not the tool’s default but the project’s need.

Where does this tool put the friction?

Every tool makes some things a one-click action and other things a tedious workaround.

Instagram makes it stupidly easy to crop to a vertical aspect ratio and add a trending audio track in a Reels interface; it makes it awkward to post, say, a 12-minute horizontal video essay with chapter markers. The platform’s affordances don’t ban long-form, horizontal, reflective content—technically you can upload it—but they discourage it through micro-frictions.

This shows up at more mundane levels too. A writing app that auto-corrects aggressively and underlines every sentence fragment is a different cognitive environment than one that lets you type nonsense freely. A coding editor that ships with built-in snippets and autocomplete for a particular framework quietly makes that framework the default way of thinking about problems.

Sometimes you want that. If you’re writing a lot of React code, it’s a relief for the editor to whisper: “Here’s the pattern you probably want.” Other times you want to fight it.

Friction is not the enemy. It’s a steering wheel.

Consider where your current tools are placing friction:

• Do they make it easier to start or easier to finish?
• Do they make copying existing patterns trivial and inventing new ones taxing?
• Do they make exploring ten variants a breeze—but commiting to one excruciating?

Then notice how that maps to your creative bottlenecks.

If your struggle is that you never start, you might want tools that constrain scope and make beginning effortless—a 3-minute voice memo app, an art app with only one brush, a songwriting tool with a tiny loop grid.

If your struggle is that you never finish, you might want the opposite: tools that make endless noodling slightly harder and shipping slightly easier. That could mean setting up a publishing workflow where hitting “publish” is literally one button in your editor, or imposing a constraint (as YouTuber-turned-filmmaker Robert Rodriguez once put it) that you must make the film “with what you have,” leaning into the “freedom of limitations” rather than waiting for better gear. (glasp.co)

How many different kinds of minds can this tool support?

Some tools, especially newer “creativity support” systems, are trying explicitly to balance flexibility and constraints. A 2025 study on such systems suggested that strategically limiting features and complexity, rather than endlessly adding more options, can actually boost virtual teams’ creativity and reduce overwhelm. (sciencedirect.com) The design implication: don’t assume more features equals more creativity.

Likewise, AI-assisted design tools like UIDEC, which help UI/UX designers ideate under constraints like brand identity and target audience, seem to work best when they reflect the diversity of designers’ attitudes towards constraints. Some want strict guidelines to bounce off; others want soft guardrails they can bend. (arxiv.org)

The more you understand your own relationship with constraints—do you bristle? relax?—the better you can choose or configure tools to support your way of working, rather than forcing yourself into a one-size-fits-all creative cage.

You’re not just buying a license. You’re hiring a collaborator with a personality.

The constraints hiding in plain sight

So far we’ve talked about obvious tools: apps, software, AI models. But some of the most powerful creativity-shaping tools in your life are not marketed as tools at all.

They’re standards. Defaults. Infrastructure.

The length of a pop song used to be constrained by how much music could fit onto a 7-inch 45 rpm single—around three to four minutes. That physical limitation seeped into our expectations. Even today, in the era of streaming, where there’s no such constraint, songs cluster around that length. The tool (the physical record) is gone; the constraint remains in our heads.

Kodak’s Instamatic cameras in the 1960s produced square photos on 126 film. Decades later, Instagram’s original logo and default image format echoed that square—an aesthetic callback baked into thousands of design decisions. (en.wikipedia.org) The shape of casual photography changed because a film cartridge designer once chose a rectangle.

Shipping containers—standardized boxes 20 or 40 feet long—were invented to solve the very unromantic problem of loading and unloading cargo more efficiently. Over time, those steel rectangles reshaped global trade, port cities, even architecture, as people repurposed containers into homes and offices. A creativity explosion followed from the constraint of a box size.

On a more intimate level, your laptop screen size constrains how many windows you can comfortably see at once. Your phone’s camera defaults constrain how you frame everyday life. Your calendar app’s time increments (15 minutes? 30?) subtly define what a “reasonable” meeting length is.

We rarely experience these as creative constraints. They’re just “how things are.” But they quietly influence what we design, build, and even feel is possible.

This is why the extended mind idea is so radical if you take it seriously. If it’s true that our cognitive system spills out into the world—into screens, notebooks, spaces, other people—then the “design” of our creativity is massively bigger than what happens in our skulls.

You can cultivate creativity not just by reading books about “how to have ideas,” but by curating the environment that your ideas have to live in.

You can think of it as designing the studio your future self will walk into.

Designing your future studio

Imagine, again, a future version of you walking into a creative space. It might be your literal office or home studio. It might be the constellation of digital tools you open when you sit down to work.

What do you want that future self to find easy?

What do you want them to find slightly difficult?

If you want them to generate lots of raw material—sketches, riffs, outlines—then the space should make starting almost frictionless and make judgment slightly harder. That could mean keeping a cheap notebook and a fat marker on your desk instead of only a pristine journal that feels too precious to mess up. It could mean using a writing app in full-screen mode with no red underlines and no visible word count.

If you want them to finish more pieces, then the space should make publishing or sharing low-friction, and make endless revision annoyingly high-friction. That could mean setting up a blog where dragging a file into a folder auto-publishes, or configuring your design tool to archive versions so you can’t tinker endlessly without noticing.

If you want them to explore beyond the aesthetic ruts of their favorite apps, you might deliberately bring in tools from different eras or domains: a film camera that gives you only 24 shots, a charcoal set that forces big gestures, a music sampler limited to 8 tracks, a Lego set with only two colors.

The point is not nostalgia. It’s to vary the constraints your extended mind lives inside, so that different parts of your creativity can surface.

There’s a reason some artists maintain separate spaces or rituals for different modes of work. A novelist might draft longhand at the kitchen table and edit in a quiet office. A designer might ideate with sticky notes and refine in Figma. Annie Murphy Paul writes about having a giant corkboard wall covered in index cards when working on The Extended Mind, because the physicality and spatial layout helped her juggle more concepts than she could in her head or on a single screen. (theinformed.life)

You may not have a spare wall, but you almost certainly have more control over your cognitive environment than you’re currently exercising.

Consider, for example, the apps on your phone’s home screen. Which ones are there is a form of constraint design. An app on the home screen is “free” to open; an app buried in a folder is behind a small but real wall of friction. If you put your camera, notes app, and voice memos on that first screen—and banish social feeds two swipes away—you’ve changed the cost structure of two kinds of creativity: making vs consuming.

Similarly, in your creative software of choice, you can often hide features or panels. If certain knobs tempt you into premature perfectionism, bury them. If certain templates or filters keep pulling you towards clichés, delete them or at least rename them to something honest, like “Boring Instagram Sunset.”

You’re allowed to fight back.

You are already more creative than you think

At this point, you might reasonably object: isn’t all this talk about tools and constraints and extended minds just a fancy way of saying that environment matters?

Yes. But the stakes are higher than they first appear—especially if you’ve grown up with a story about creativity as an inner trait you either have or you don’t.

If creativity lives not only in our heads but in our tools, then you’ve already been participating in far more creative acts than you’ve been giving yourself credit for.

Each time you choose a slightly unusual Instagram angle rather than the obvious one, you’ve nudged the massive collective visual language a millimeter. Each time you tinker with a color grade, or arrange furniture in a room, or improvise a workaround with tape and cardboard to fix something, you’re engaging with constraints and tools the same way a “capital C” Creative does—just usually without the label.

Conversely, if you have been telling yourself “I’m not creative” because you struggle to come up with ideas in certain settings, it may be less about your inner resources and more about the specific constraint-tool combos you’ve been working under.

Give the “uncreative” person the right box—clear boundaries, a tangible medium, a playful tool—and they often surprise themselves.

Consider Phil Hansen, an art student whose hand developed a tremor that ruined his ability to do the precise pointillist drawings he loved. A neurologist suggested he “embrace the shake” rather than fight it. Hansen began experimenting with scribbles, with painting with his feet, with creating images out of coffee cups and karate chops and even destroying his own art as part of the piece. The limitation became the source of a wildly inventive career. (ed.ted.com)

In his TED talk, he makes a simple but powerful claim: “Embracing limitations can actually drive creativity.” The blank canvas felt overwhelming; the shaky hand and the cheap, constrained materials pushed him to think in new ways.

You may or may not have a dramatic constraint story like that. But you already live inside countless subtler ones: budgets, time windows, toolkits, physical spaces.

Rather than fantasizing about a future where those all vanish—and with them, supposedly, your creative blocks—you might get further by asking:

What if the constraints I’m stuck with are actually the building blocks of a style?

Making peace with the box

There’s one more objection worth addressing.

Isn’t there something a bit depressing about all this? Do we really want to say that we’re products of our tools, that our creativity is shaped by presets and defaults and shipping container standards?

Isn’t that a little… unromantic?

You can look at it that way. Or you can flip the perspective.

If creativity is this weird, fragile, internal magic that either appears or doesn’t, then there’s not much you can do about it on a Tuesday afternoon besides wait and hope.

If, instead, creativity is an emergent property of a whole system—brain, body, tools, space, constraints—then suddenly you have levers.

You can’t directly will yourself into having a breakthrough. But you can:

• Change the questions you ask (different constraints).
• Change the materials you touch (different tools).
• Change the way you lay out problems in space (different externalizations).
• Change the friction profile of your environment (different defaults).

You can treat your mind not as a mysterious black box, but as part of a larger, tangible thing you can design.

That doesn’t kill the romance. In many ways, it deepens it. Because it means that those small, almost invisible choices you make about how to set up your desk or what app to use or how long your timeboxes are—that unglamorous “plumbing”—is not separate from creativity. It is creativity, in slow motion.

The songwriter faced with an empty DAW and two hundred plugins is not less talented than the band who had only four tracks. But he is, in a sense, more alone with his options. No physical track limits are forcing him to make hard choices. No tape hiss is urging him to print the take. The constraint has to be chosen rather than imposed.

That’s harder. It’s also an opportunity.

You can decide to be the kind of person who designs good boxes for yourself.

You can be suspicious of tools that pretend to be neutral, that quietly standardize everything into the same glossy sameness.

You can tilt your environment so that, when you’re tired and tempted to take the easy way out, the easy way out is at least pointed in a direction you respect.

And when the inevitable constraints you didn’t choose—budget cuts, platform rules, physical limitations—show up, you can test for that subtle difference: is this a pointless cage, or an interesting problem?

If it’s the latter, it might be the start of a style.

The tools are dreaming. Dream back

Let’s go back, one last time, to that midnight studio.

The producer is still staring at his three glowing screens. The plugins aren’t going anywhere. The infinite options are still there.

But he stands up. Walks over to the corner, where there’s an old, dust-covered hardware sampler—a relic from the 1990s—that a friend left there years ago. It has 16 pads, a tiny monochrome display, and about as much memory as a greeting card.

He plugs it in.

He loads exactly one drum break into it—a crusty four-bar loop—and assigns it across the pads with different pitch and filter settings. Now, instead of a list of 700 snares, he has 16 ways of abusing the same sound.

He hits record. The sampler has limited storage, so he has to commit quickly.

In twenty minutes, he has a drum pattern he never would have programmed in the grid. It’s messy, a little off, alive. The singer looks up from her phone. “Wait, what’s that?” she asks.

He grins, a little sheepishly. “The box,” he says. “I shrunk it.”

He’ll take that loop back into the DAW, of course. He’ll use modern tools to polish and mix and master. But the heart of the track—the idea that everything else grows around—comes not from unlimited freedom, but from a deliberate constraint.

His infinite digital studio didn’t stop dreaming; it’s still there, humming with possibility. But for a moment, he stepped outside it and dreamed back—chose a different medium, a different extended mind.

You don’t need a sampler or a studio to do the same sort of thing.

You have a phone, some paper, a keyboard, a browser, an imagination that is far larger than the boxes it currently lives in.

The boxes are not the enemy. They’re the scaffolding.

Just make sure you’re the one deciding how they’re built.