Principia Arbiter

1. Per­fec­tion is achieved, not when there is noth­ing more to add, but when there is noth­ing left to take away.
2. One can fur­nish a room very lux­u­ri­ously by tak­ing out fur­ni­ture rather than putting it in.
3. Make every detail per­fect and limit the num­ber of details to perfect.
4. IP and lines of code are lia­bil­i­ties, not assets.
5. Sim­plic­ity is the ulti­mate sophistication.
6. Sim­plic­ity is com­plex­ity solved.
7. Less is more.

All the phrases above, which I had gath­ered on Quora, sug­gest a reduc­tion­ist approach to design. It seems to me most peo­ple who sub­scribe to the min­i­mal­is­tic mind­set don’t have a clue what sim­plic­ity really is. Less is not more. Enough is more.

Before I elab­o­rate, Here’s a quote from Steve Jobs which describes the actual process of design very well.

When you start look­ing at a prob­lem and it seems really sim­ple, you don’t really under­stand the com­plex­ity of the prob­lem. Then you get into the prob­lem, and you see that it’s really com­pli­cated, and you come up with all these con­vo­luted solu­tions. That’s sort of the mid­dle, and that’s where most peo­ple stop… But the really great per­son will keep on going and find the key, the under­ly­ing prin­ci­ple of the prob­lem — and come up with an ele­gant, really beau­ti­ful solu­tion that works.

That’s right. Most peo­ple stop at the mid­dle. They are happy with com­plex­ity, mis­tak­ing it for rich­ness and power. They over-design. They are the max­i­mal­ists min­i­mal­ists like to crit­i­cize. Min­i­mal­ists’ answer to over-designing is under-designing. “Con­tent is ugly! White space is beau­ti­ful!”. They are both wrong. Both over-design and under-design are mal-design when rel­a­tive to enough design.

Stop­ping in the mid­dle at com­plex­ity is an obvi­ous prob­lem. Reduc­ing and not adding enough before reach­ing com­plex­ity is a less obvi­ous but big­ger prob­lem. We are see­ing the pri­mary cause of prod­uct fail­ure shift from com­plex­ity to poor mar­ket fit. It used to be some­thing had so many fea­tures that it prob­a­bly fit­ted into mul­ti­ple mar­kets but because it was too com­plex it sucked and failed. Now we are see­ing sim­plis­tic prod­ucts with lesser fea­tures but are hardly useful.

Look at the illus­tra­tion above. I’d say the process of design­ing a truly good prod­uct there­fore begins with a relent­less pur­suit of infor­ma­tion to form the ini­tial chaos from which the designer with his intu­ition, craft and knowl­edge can derive the ini­tial order which is then dis­tilled. The end result is a state of care­fully con­sid­ered sim­plic­ity, as opposed to blind sim­plism or complexity.

Here’s another quote from Albert Einstein.

Make every­thing as sim­ple as pos­si­ble, but not simpler.

Ein­stein sug­gests there is a limit how sim­ple you can be. This is true but it is only half the equa­tion. You can­not make any­thing sim­ple from a state of noth­ing­ness which is sim­pler. You can­not reduce your way to a pos­i­tive value from zero. You have to start at zero, move to a very high pos­i­tive value and fall back to a lesser but opti­mal pos­i­tive value. Design is there­fore both reduc­tion and addi­tion. Design is adjustment.

Update: I found a quote from Mil­ton Glaser’s 2001 AIGA Talk he gave in Lon­don titled Ten Things I Have Learned.

LESS IS NOT NECESSARILY MORE.
Being a child of mod­ernism I have heard this mantra all my life. Less is more. One morn­ing upon awak­en­ing I realised that it was total non­sense, it is an absurd propo­si­tion and also fairly mean­ing­less. But it sounds great because it con­tains within it a para­dox that is resis­tant to under­stand­ing. But it sim­ply does not obtain when you think about the visual of the his­tory of the world. If you look at a Per­sian rug, you can­not say that less is more because you realise that every part of that rug, every change of colour, every shift in form is absolutely essen­tial for its aes­thetic suc­cess. You can­not prove to me that a solid blue rug is in any way supe­rior. That also goes for the work of Gaudi, Per­sian minia­tures, art nou­veau and every­thing else. How­ever, I have an alter­na­tive to the propo­si­tion that I believe is more appro­pri­ate. ‘Just enough is more.’

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