Since my last post on note-taking software, I have run across another program, Curio, which claims to be “the ultimate brainstorming and document management environment”. While I’m not sold on all this yet, and haven’t yet checked Curio out, their assertions attempting to differentiate it from note-taking software brings up an interesting idea.

Zengobi, Curio’s developer, asserts on its web page that Curio’s free-form design allows you more freedom to put things wherever you want, so that your creativity is enhanced. This doesn’t seem like such a big deal to me, but it brings up an interesting controversy. Most design novices seem to think that a wide-ranging lack of constraint is what stimulates good design, but I strongly disagree. This is at root a philosophical issue - does greater freedom alone invigorate something, or not?

I would say that greater freedom does add life to something, to a point. But without some boundaries to constrain a design, the choices become so limitless that only internal limits of the designer will keep the design on track. A good example of this is what happened in the early years with the Mac when font choices exploded. Only those with a great deal of good taste managed to minimize font usage to the few that were really needed. Apple’s original Mac documentation was an early example of tasteful font usage.

So in other words, most people, even average creative people, need a considerable amount of constraints in order to produce quality designs, and even top designers will probably find limits helpful most of the time.

The point of all this is that in looking for software that helps me think, write, and plan other creative work, I’m generally not looking for some totally free-form approach (this may be where Microsoft is missing it with the Tablet PC). As I reflect more on this, it’s dawning on me that what I really need is an array of tools that all allow creative expression in differing ways but that can be integrated together (unified search, project management, templates, etc.).

It seems to me that most really creative designers have quite a range of tools at their disposal. Susan once worked for a successful industrial designer and he had all sorts of “toys” in his office. Probably the most creative person I’ve ever met, my friend Dave, always amazed me at the wide range of media in which he worked. Maybe the constraint that software should be trying to lift is that of being limited to just the several tools any single program is likely to implement well.

This makes me wonder if what would really fill the bill for idea software would be something like an Eclipse (programming) environment oriented toward creativity, rather than programming. Eclipse allows many plug-in tools to be used together while managing various projects.

The next question I can’t help but ask is, Is there any fundamental reason why the Eclipse environment itself wouldn’t be suited for this? I’m not familiar enough with Eclipse to assess this (maybe the GUI would be a problem for drawing, etc.?), but I wonder if at least parts of it could be used in this way. Then all these different drawing, outlining, note-taking, search/agent functions might be made into Eclipse plug-ins (as is happening with all the programming tools now), and we could work much creatively.