Epilogue

Abstract

In order to innovate, one must have an open mind. One must be willing to relax one’s constraints in order to examone alternatives. Innovation comes from one’s ability to break the rules, to look beyond the norms and to avoid mind-sets. In fact, many of the ideas about constraint relaxation presented in this book are themselves a result of constraint relaxation! As I recall, the hardest task in applying constraint relaxation to a problem is not the relaxation of the constraints but their identification in the first place. We often solve problems making too many assumptions about the world. Our training forces us to impose constraints without being aware of them. For example, consider the following question: ‘Why do flat mirrors flip images left to right and not up to down?’. Many people have problems answering this question, as they make assumptions about mirrors that are really not necessary. Computer models such as CYCLOPS can handle constraints that are explicit in the representation. People, however, can solve problems by extending or changing their view of the problem by switching among representations. We have yet to understand this process.