One of my friends shared this wonderful link about Simplicity on his Facebook profile. Here are the ten laws of simplicity by John Maeda.
- Reduce – The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction
- Organize – Organization makes a system of many appear fewer
- Saving Time – Savings in time feel like simplicity
- Learning – Knowledge makes everything simpler
- Differences – Simplicity and Complexity need each other
- Context – What lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral
- Emotions – More emotions are better than less
- Trust – In simplicity we trust
- Failure – Somethings can never be made simpler
- The One – Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful
Here is the link to the original blog post. Here is the link to the book on Laws of Simplicity.
My thoughts:
- I do not understand 7. How can more emotions be better? Does this law contradict laws 1 and 10? This one certainly bears more thinking.
- In fact Edward De Bono, has an entire book on Simplicity. At the end of that book, I found that simplicity is not really simple to achieve. Achieving simplicity is a complex process. YOu need to strive hard for it.
Are these laws contextual? Do they apply only to design or to other problems as well? I guess I need to read the book to find out. Some thing tells me that I need to get back to this subject in more detail later.