Simplicity
The NY Times has a nice article on the Simplicity Design Studio held by John Maeda, Cynthia Breazeal, Chris Csikszentmihályi, and Hiroshi Ishii at the Media Lab.
From the Simplicty Design Studio website.
We are working to establish an intellectual framework around the topic of SIMPLICITY by collaborating with some of the world’s top graphic and product designers. The SIMPLICITY Design Studio will leverage professional design knowledge combined with topics in emerging technology to find ways whereby complex user interactions can become vastly simplified.
I am excited by this for 2 reasons.
The first is the inclusion of professional designers, from multiple disciplines, in the research environment. The distance between professional designers (by which I mean a common-sense usage of that term) and research, even design research, is often vast. This is not only unfortunate, it’s problematic. The everyday practice of design/designers in the studio environment offers a wealth of knowledge and methods to be applied to research. In my own work, I often struggle to remember the practice of design in the midst of the demands of design research.
The second is the topic of Simplicity as a research agenda and the basis for a curriculum. Simplicity is not a new idea by any means. But despite all the discourse, there has been little advancement of the idea in practice. The development of a research agenda and curriculum around simplicity, especially within such a technologically focused environment, is encouraging.
It will be interesting to see how the ideas from this studio trickle out and through the world of technology research and design.
Maggie said,
May 25, 2004 @ 11 am
This quote struck me as interesting.
“The brainstorm suggested crucial elements: transparency, aesthetic appeal, restraint, just-in-time information.”
Are these really what we mean by simplicity? I’m not saying that they aren’t, but it seems like the first step might be to really try and move beyond these terms which seem to have such a loaded history in the design realm especially.
And I was reminded of the Eames movie about computers when the article talked about transparency especially in dealing with the ambient intelligence initiative. When the Eames made that movie (I think) people didn’t really interact with computers on an every day basis. Computer where this foreign thing that lived in big rooms in office buildings. But since computers have come to live all around us, no one has remade the Eames move about computers. Why is that? Why does the transparency have to be in the object itself? Why can’t the transparency be part of the culture?
Jim Amos said,
August 8, 2004 @ 4 am
Your link to the ‘Simplicity Design Studio’ website currently points to your own url.