Simplicity as Innovation
This morning I came across this article on netbooks in my feed reader and a quote at the end of the first page really stood out. “In the process of creating a laptop to satisfy the needs of poor people, she revealed something about traditional PC users. They didn’t want more out of a laptop—they wanted less.” That’s a pretty profound statement that all designers should consider when making a product or design.
There is a sweet spot between simplicity and complexity, a sort of supply-demand curve for an effective design. Although netbooks are cheaper to make and would see increased demand because of that, the constraints of having to make the product cheaper for a specific demograpic enabled innovation. That innovation opened up the product to a mainstream audience.
As designers, we should embrace restrictions and constraints. It’s the essential difference between art and design. I’ve talked about simplicity a bunch of times in previous posts, but this article has illustrated that simplicity can also be an innovation.
” and it synthesized a lot of my previous design philosophies. The first law that he talks about, the law of reduce, is one that I have long believed to be one of the most important rules for designers. Design is about subtraction more than addition. This is one of the hardest things to teach because designers are creative and make things, but unless it solves the design problem, adding things to a design is more about ego.