I have gotten out of the habit of reading
Signals vs. Noise, but recently added it back to my RSS list.
It's the people from from 37signals posting about lots of stuff.
Their
recent post about design variety is great. He's talking about
web design and relates the open-ness of the constraints (as in,
there isn't much) as an option to design more differences. He uses
watches as an example.
It's such a small space, and it has a basic requirement: to
display the time. Serious constraints. And yet, there are a ton of
options. New watch designs are forever cropping up.
If you feel the need to tidily summarize this concepts insert
that thought here.
Otherwise, I'm just tagging in another example of ideas and
constraints and wondering if constraints don't actually help you
come up with better ideas.
Previous post on constraints and coming up with ideas:
http://mjpriebe.blogspot.com/2007/07/constraints-are-good-olpc-one-laptop.html