Minimalism unleashes Creativity

While both ‘minimalism’ and ‘creativity’ are two abstract concepts, they share a relationship that could be manifested using certain concrete examples. This post highlights a few of such examples with an intention to further glorify the power of minimalism.

Minimalism has been defined in multiple contexts including philosophy, religion, architecture, and user interface design. Ever since I consciously embraced the idea, I have had conversations about this with many different people. Barring a few, the idea per se does not sound convincing to people and what often follows is the cynicism towards the idea. So, I spent quite some time reflecting on the most convincing advantage of minimalism – and chose to cast creativity! Here is a list of some areas where minimalism is likely to lead to creative thinking.

1. Stuff. There cannot be a better way of understanding the minimalism-creativity correlation than visiting the New Uses of Old Things section of Real Simple. This just shows creativity at its best when faced with a scarcity of resources, i.e., physical stuff.

2. Wardrobe. Heard of the Six Items or Less experiment? This experiment is a challenge to limit your wardrobe to six items or less(excluding accessories and essentials) for an entire month. To understand the power of a limited wardrobe, one should definitely give this a try. You would be surprised by the creative mix and match combinations, fashion statements you eventually create.

3. Ancient Play Days. Remember the days when there were no TVs and videogames? The limitedness of the resources provided us with out of the box ways of having fun and getting entertained. At least the non digital natives would remember how many creative games and stories were invented back then.

4. Interiors. The scarcity of space or resources brings out the interior designer in anyone and helps invent visually interesting techniques such as using a stack of books as a side table. Some super cool examples can be found in Apartment Therapy’s Smallest home contest.

5. Computer Programming. An interviewer asks you to write a code to remove duplicates from an unsorted linked list. You somehow do it. You are then asked to design an algorithm to determine if a string has all unique characters. You still manage to do it given you have some mid-level programming expertise. Suppose there now is a twist in the question - that you cannot use additional data structures…now what? That’s how the interviewers test the creativity of the candidates, possibly to see how well the candidate could make use of the minimal information implied in the question.

6. Technical Writing. You are asked to describe your research study. Sure, you could do it and go on and on about the problem, questions, experiments, and results. But what if you are asked to condense your work into 8 pages? Well this is exactly when you are start thinking of new ways to present your results (e.g. use a pie chart instead of a table), and invent new terms to describe the study.

While Daniel Pink happily declares that the future belongs to the creatively gifted “right-brainers,” many people complain of not being creative by birth. I believe minimalism has the power to induce creativity into anyone who attempts to follow the path. While I presented only a handful or examples supporting the positive correlation between minimalism and creativity, I am on a lookout for more such examples supporting or even refuting the claim.