Simplicity

I was just reading John Maeda’s Third Law of Simplicty where he states the following:

Simplicity is not driven by reducing the quantity (of anything) for the sake of achieving less, but more in the issue of increasing the quality of an experience in ways that a rich holism of many elements can be achieved. Which brings us to the third law of simplicity which I hereby entitle the “Add Whipped Cream and Cherries” approach:

When the richness of an experience
is increased in a manner that facilitates
the perception of the overall intent,
by all means don’t skimp. Add more!

I think this helped me to realize a bit more, why I think that Dieter Rams’ Less, but better should be interpreted quite differently than the pretty common minimalism cliché Less is more – I wrote a bit about this here (some comments in german, though).

If you want to express both of them as something like a design method or approach, I think the difference could be something like this:

Less is more
To me the is makes it a pretty inflexible dogma. It assumes and pretends that something automatically works just because it is less. It might seduce you to underestimate a given challenge, to satisfy you with something you could actually do even better. To me it doesn’t really cry for experimentation. Although a very minimal design can be the result of a profound and sophisticated development process, as a principle it still has this (mind-)limiting aftertaste.

Less, but better
But better has a much more inspiring, mind-activating and challenging undertone to me: Try to solve it with little – it eventually won’t work well enough, so add more until you think you’ve found the perfect balance (remember: you wanna do it better). And if you think you went over the top, feel free to radically remove things again before you start falling in love with a mediocre solution. Or maybe just stop designing for a moment, show it to your friends and colleagues – or erase all you did and restart the next day with another idea in mind.

It’s a creative process. There are no absolute measures for little or much, for less or more – it’s about creating an experience that makes sense, works, is fun … appropriate to its given aim.

So finally Maeda’s More is better-headline is a perfect example how the meaning of an apparent principle can get pretty blurred or distorted if you isolate it and do not have a look behind the curtain.

[Update] It’s always the same: bloggers write faster than they read. While continuing to read Maeda’s Simplicity, I figured that all other laws are also really illuminating when thinking about – yeah, simplicity! :-)

[Another update] I hate the word “bloggers”.