Too much!!! ???? Information Overload? While reading the Brand Autopsy blog post on Simplifying Simplicity, I came across MIT Professor John Maeda's book, The Laws of Simplicity, released last August. Maeda is a graphic design and computer scientist. One of his mentors told him to become a lightbulb, not a laserbeam. Simplicity is elegance and so I was very interested in what he has to say.
It is on my "to read" list because it is a book that is easy to read and I think we all need to be reminded how to simplify. The book is about his basic laws. He lists them on his blog and Law #4, Knowledge Makes Everything Simpler, makes sense to me. That one says, "mneumonic rule for learning how to turn a screwdriver: "righty tighty, lefty loosy. But you have to have a second layer of knowledge: knowing right from left. So taking the time to learn actually simplifies life in the long run. " YES, YES, YES.
Maeda's Simplicity Law #10 is the important one I'll leave you with: Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful. I would think it is very similar to one of the major Laws (not a Maeda Law), the Occam's Razor principle, which is often expressed in Latin as the lex parsimoniae (law of succinctness).
So. That's it.
I'm working on it, MP. I am. Thanks for a well-written post.
Posted by: merry mama | November 04, 2006 at 10:06 PM