The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda

• Simplicity = Sanity
• Simplicity is a quality that not only evokes passionate loyalty for a product design, but also has become a key strategic tool for businesses to confront their own intrinsic complexities.
• There are three flavors of simplicity discussed here, where the successive set of three Laws correspond to increasingly complicated conditions of simplicity: basic, intermediate, and deep.
• Ten Laws
• Reduce: The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.
• Organize: Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.
• Time: Savings in time feel like simplicity.
• Learn: 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: Some things can never be made simple.
• The One: Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.
• Three Keys
• Away: More appears less by simply moving it far, far away.
• Open: Openness simplifies complexity.
• Power: Use less, gain more.
• The easiest way to simplify a system is to remove functionality.
• The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.
• When it is possible to reduce a system’s functionality without significant penalty, true simplification is realized.
• Making things smaller doesn’t make them necessarily better, but when made so we tend to have a more forgiving attitude towards their existence. A larger-than-human-scale object demands its rightful respect, whereas a tiny object can be something that deserves our pity.
• Any design that incorporates lightness and thinness conveys the impression of being smaller, lesser, and humbler. Pity gives way to respect when more value is delivered than originally expected.
• Hide the complexity through brute-force methods. A classical example of this technique is the Swiss army knife. Only the tool you wish to use is exposed, while the other blades and drivers are hidden.
• The computer has an infinite amount of capacity to hide in order to create the illusion of simplicity.
• Shrinking an object lowers expectations, and the hiding of complexities allows the owner near to manage the expectations himself.
• Technology creates the problem of complexity, but also affords new materials and methods for the design of our relationship with complexities that shall only continue to multiply.
• Consumers will only be drawn to the smaller, less functional product if they perceive it to be more valuable than a bigger version of the product with more features. Thus the perception of quality becomes a critical factor when making the choice off less over more.
• Perceived excellence can be programmed into consumers with the power of marketing.
• Embodying an object with properties of real quality is the basis of the luxury goods industry and iis rooted in their use of precious metals and exquisite craftsmanship.
• The upside of materializm is that the way something we own feels can change how we feel.
• The home is usually the first battleground ttt that comes to mind when facing the daily challenge of managing complexity. Stuff just seems to multiply. There are three strategies for achieving simplicity in the living realm:
• Buy a bigger house
• Put everything you don’t really need into storage
• Organize your existing assets in a systematic fashion
• Organization makes a system of many appear fewer. Of course this will only hold if the number of groups is significantly less than the number of items to be organized.
• The Pareto Principle is useful as a rule of thumb: assume that in any given bin of data, generally 80% can be managed at lower priority and 2000% requires the highest level.
• Everything is important, but knowing where to start is the critical first step.
• Finding the organizational scheme that works best for you is a wise investment.
• The tabular from of viewing data is by no means rocket science, but it is a rare sort of visual magic that always works. In the medium of text, tabs break up the linear space of a document such that the paragraphs can stand out as the organizing principle.
• Humans are organization animals. We can’t help but to group and categorize what we see.
• The principles of Gestalt to seek the most appropriate conceptual “fit” are important not only for survival, but lie at the very heart of the discipline of design.
• Groups are good; too many groups are bad because they counteract the goal of grouping in the first place.
• Blurred groupings are powerful because they can appear even more simple, but at the cost of becoming more abstract, less concrete. Hence simplicity can be a creative way of looking at the world that is driven by design.
• When forced to wait, life seems unnecessarily complex. Savings in time feel like simplicity. And we are thankfully loyal when it happens, which is rare.
• Reducing the time spent waiting translates into time we can spend on something else. In the end it’s about choosing how we spend the time we’re given in life.
• Reducing a five-minute task to one minute is the raison d’etre of operations management, the field that has brought us a world that never sleeps and is always on time.
• Giving up the option of choice, and letting a machine choose for you, is a radical approach to shrinking the time we might spend otherwise fumbling with the iPod’s scroll-wheel.
• At the end of the day, there is an end of the day. Thus choosing when to care less versus when to care more lies at the heart of living an efficient but fulfilling daily life.
• Telling people how much time they have left to wait is a humane practice that is becoming more popular.
• Knowledge is comfort, and comfort lies at the heart of simplicity.
• Making critical processes run faster is a fantastic benefit to humankind.
• The realization that life is about waiting comes later in life. As a child, the idea of waiting is something foreign and simply intolerable. But waiting is what we do in the adult world. We do it all the time.
• When speeding-up a process is not an option, giving extra care to a customer makes the experience of waiting more tolerable.
• Saving time or staying in step with the flow of time--whichever costs the least to implement--will usually win the day.
• Saving time is thus the tradeoff between the quantitatively fast versus the qualitatively fast.
• Knowledge makes everything simpler. This is true for any object, no matter how difficult.
• The problem with taking time to learn a task is that you often feel you are wasting time, a violation of the third Law.
• Being a professor is the easiest thing in the world--you just have to act like you know all the answers. Being a student is much harder because you not only have to wring the answers from the cryptic professor, but you also have to make sense of them.
• Learning occurs best when there is a desire to attain specific knowledge.
• The first step in conveying the basics is to assume the position of the first-time learner.
• Observing what filas to make sense to the non-expert, and then following that trail successively to the very end of the knowledge chain is the critical path to success.
• The easiest way to learn the basics is to teach the basics yourself.
• Repeating yourself can be embarrassing, especially if you are self-conscious--which most everyone is. But there’s no need to feel ashamed, because repetition works and everyone does it.
• A gentle, inspired start is the best way to draw students, or even a new customer, into the immersive process of learning.
• Inspiration is the ultimate catalysts for learning: internal motivation trumps external reward.
• The practice of education is the highest form of intellectual philanthropy.
• The best designers marry function with form to create intuitive experiences that we understand immediately--no lessons (or cursing) needed. Good design relies to some extend on the ability to instill a sense of instant familiarity.
• Design starts by leveraging the human instinct to relate, followed by translating the relationship into a tangible object or service, and then ideally adding a little surprise at the end to make your audience’s efforts worthwhile. Or writing these steps in shorthand: relate-translate-surprise!
• Metaphors are useful platforms for transferring a large body of existing knowledge from one context to another with minimal, often imperceptible, effort on the part of the person crossing the conceptual bridge. But metaphors are only deeply engaging if they surprise along some unexpected, positive dimension.
• A metaphor used as a learning shortcut for a complex design is most effective when its execution is both relevant and delightfully unexpected.
• Difficult tasks seem easier when they are “need to know” rather than “nice to know”.
• In the beginning of life we strive for independence, and at the end of life it is the same. At the core of the best rewards is this fundamental desire for freedom in thinking, living, and being.
• We know how to appreciate something better when we can compare it to something else.
• Simplicity and complexity need each other. The more complexity there is in the market, the more that something simpler stands out. And because technology will only continue to grow in complexity, there is a clear economic benefit to adopting a strategy of simplicity that will help set your product apart. That said, establishing a feeling of simplicity in design requires making complexity consciously available in some explicit form.
• There is no way to connect with simplicity when how complexity feels has been forgotten.
• The opportunity lost by increasing the amount of blank space is gained back with enhanced attention on what remains. More white space means that less information is presented.
• When there is less, we appreciate everything much more.
• Simple objects are easier and less expensive to produce, and those savings can be translated directly to the consumer with desirable low prices.
• The combination of a simple object together with a host of optional accessories gives consumers the benefit of expressing their feelings and feelings for their objects.
• The best art makes your head spin with questions. Perhaps this is the fundamental distinction between pure art and pure design. White great art makes you wonder, great design makes things clear.
• A certain kind of more is always better than less--more care, more love, and more meaningful actions I don’t think I need to say anything more really.
• Vanity is a high risk sport that raises the stakes when all you can offer to a client is your word and your reputation as a Master. Overconfidence is usually the enemy of greatness, and there’s little room for personal ego when pleasing a customer is the true priority.
• Knowing that a purchase is correctable later makes the shopping process simpler because you know that any decision make is not final.
• A product that can correct our mistakes as they happen performs an important service and gains our trust.
• Trusting a power greater than our own is a custom that is ingrained from birth when the adults that care for us provide the ultimate experience of simplicity. Every need and desire is met by a parent; and in return, beyond just offering our trust, we entrust our love.
• In contrast to the trusting relationship with a Master, the power of undo results in a feeling of simplicity that is rooted in not having to care at all.
• Embrace undo as a rational partner in maintaining the many complex relationships with the objects in your environment.
• The more a system knows about you, the less you have to think. Conversely, the more you know about the system, the greater control you can exact.
• Some things can never be made simple.
• Knowing that simplicity can be elusive in certain cases is an opportunity to make more constructive use of your time in the future, instead of chasing after an apparently impossible goal. However there’s no harm in initiating the search for simplicity even when success is deemed as too closely or otherwise out of reach.
• Everyone’s instinct is different, and thus a single answer is not readily available to achieve the optimal balance between simplicity and complexity.
• Simplicity is hopelessly subtle, and many of its defining characteristics are implicit (noting that it hides in simplicity).
• Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.
• More appears like less by simply moving it far, far away. Thus an experience is made simpler by keeping the result local, and moving the actual work to a far away location.
• Fundamental to the effectiveness of away is how to maintain reliable communication with an outsourced task.
• Openness simplifies complexity. With an open system, the power of the many can outweigh the power of the few.
• A deep form of simplicity is rooted in trust.
• Electronic devices can never be truly simple unless the are freed from their dependence on power. A seemingly unpowered electronic device may seem like an oxymoron, but it is critical to achieve.
• The mercurial cost of fuel and it's inevitable link to geopolitics make any discussion of power complex.
• Technology and life only become complex if you let it be so.
• While technology is an exhilarating enabler, it can be an exasperating disabler as well.