Hauries d´instal.lar el plug-in del flash... Descarregar plug-in de Flash

Critics

Books and Publications

Disminuir Aumentar

Towards a simpler future

Book

Jordi Montaner | 17 may 2010

Title: The Laws of Simplicity (Las leyes de simplicidad)
Author: John Maeda
Year: 2006 (2008 in Spanish)
Publishing House: MIT Press (Gedisa in Spanish)
Translation in Spanish: Iñaki Ogallo
Pages: 127 (100 in Spanish)

The present seems increasingly complex, but does it have its origin in a simple past? John Maeda takes it for granted that this is so. He argues that everything original is essentially simple in nature. This designer, digital artist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) confesses in his most famous book to date that ever since he was a child he has gone crazy for simple things. A native of Seattle, but of Japanese descent, this 44-year-old researcher has been anointed the guru of simplicity by the digital community.

With the precision and sobriety of a haiku, Maeda's book delves into several examples of how simplicity has been applied to the design of techniques and objects and, like a sigh, teaches us to relax before a crisis that the media presents as sidereal. Maeda said that his taste for simplicity in youth was accompanied with a concern for an overwhelming sense of the end of an age, of apocalypse. “One day an old man approached me and said, ‘Don’t worry, the world has always been falling apart,’” he writes in his book The Laws of Simplicity. 

To explain why conceptual minimalism works in practice, the author turns to Formula One racing cars: “[a] prototype, although it seems otherwise, has many fewer elements than a standard car, but each component has a much higher quality...” This philosophy comes from Garcilaso ("The good, if brief, is twice as good") and can be applied to the design of things, to their size and psychological conception. Maeda recalls how larger-than-life sculptures impose respect. By contrast, miniature models transmit the impression of fragility, if not compassion. Not so in Nature, where the smallest spiders, for example, demonstrate a more potent poison than the biggest ones and, despite its ferocity, the great white shark causes far fewer deaths each year that the tiny bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa .

In order to simplify, preaches this author, it is necessary to remove the obvious and add only the specific. Maeda proposes a “reasonable reduction” of all our principles, purposes, ideas, so as to bring out the main, most important and original ones. Then, he adds, one must organize everything so that it seems even simpler. He argues that we should spend as little time as possible in everything, for the sake of simplification, so we can learn their nature (knowledge simplifies all things) and differentiate (simplicity and complexity are interdependent). He admits that in some cases, this simplification can not be carried out, but he is in favor of always projecting this idea and the confidence in its usefulness. Maeda insists that it is not a cold or calculating gesture. “The more emotions involved, the better,” he writes while also precluding a systematic discarding the excess or the extra. “That which is found at the limit of simplicity is also relevant.”

He gives the example of computer operations whose processes are governed by the laws of simplicity. Maeda founded in 1996 the Aesthetics and Computing Group of the MIT Medialab and calls for interaction between computers and users in favor of simplicity. “The artistic and visual potential of computers allows users to have a unique simplification tool,” according to the author, who has combined his career in technology training with the arts (fine arts). As a child, Maeda invented a computer program to manage his parents’ tofu business, while his companions walked about absorbed in their videogame consoles.

Esquire magazine in 1999 included the name of Maeda among the 21 most influential people to come in the 21st century.

In Japan, not a few multinational companies (Sony, Seiko, Shiseido) look to Maeda for his talent. He was responsible from the design of software programs of anti-stress art exhibitions. “Most people,” he explains, “may willingly give up some of the routine details of their lives in exchange for additional free time.” More information at www.maedastudio.com.

Comments

       
0 comments
 
Global Global Global Global
RSS