John Maeda: Cut the crap

John Maeda spoke at the New School on Wednes­day to a full room of star struck Par­sons stu­dents. The talk was extremely enter­tain­ing. His anec­dotes about tech­nol­ogy, him­self, and sim­plic­ity were graphic and charm­ing.  I am not sure if the fact that I still don’t know why this man is such a celebrity relates to my own short sight­ed­ness or the fact that when every­one seems to know you’re impor­tant, you don’t need to explain the sig­nif­i­cance of what you’re doing any­more.  Maeda’s talk addressed his laws of sim­plic­ity, but he only man­aged to cover laws 1–5 and 10.  Seems to me that this is more about feel­ing sim­ple, rather than being simple.

Okay, qualms aside, what did I get out of this talk:

1)As much as we all decry over­work­ing, the most accom­plished peo­ple seem to be com­pul­sive work­ers.  Maeda men­tioned that he had been hos­pi­tal­ized twice for over­work­ing.   Meada’s laws of sim­plic­ity seem to be as much a per­sonal jour­ney toward sus­tain­abil­ity as an intel­lec­tual con­tri­bu­tion to the design field as a whole.

2) Cute and clever is often enough.  I once had a photo pro­fes­sor insist that all I needed to do was find some­thing in plain sight that no one was see­ing ans show it to them.  An effec­tive pack­ag­ing for this in ‘cute and clever’.  To explain the essence of sim­plic­ity, Maeda used a ‘cook­ies to laun­dry’ anal­ogy.  Give a kid an option between big cookie and small cookie, they go for big cookie.  Give them the option of fold­ing small laun­dry pile and big laun­dry pile, they go for small laun­dry pile.  Thus, we as peo­ple like to min­i­mize dis­com­fort and max­i­mize plea­sure.  It’s cute, and makes sense.  Expect for now that i actu­ally take the time to write it out I see look holes, but I didn’t see the loop holes till a few days later.

3) I did get to won­der­ing about the bal­ance between estab­lish­ment and anti-establishment urges.  Maeda is a man with many many degrees.  He is com­fort­able and flour­ishes in acad­e­mia.  He also  has a bit of an anti-establishment ratio­nal­ity that came out in many exam­ples.  I have always felt like an out­sider for my anti-establishment feel­ings.  Maybe, now that we are all devel­op­ing an sub­tle edge of anti-establishment, such that we no longer trust what we are told and we demand the indi­vid­ual prod­uct, the reflec­tion of unique fitting/not-fitting, maybe this is really the norm.  We all have the same bug to vary­ing degrees.  Maybe.

4) Meada talked about doing some­thing young while your young.  I asked him what that would be if com­put­ers were young when he was young and com­put­ers aren’t young any­more.  His first response was ‘fig­ur­ing out what is crap.’  The idea is that we shouldn’t nec­es­sar­ily focus on learn­ing code.  We should fig­ure out the lim­its of com­put­ers.  He also said that study­ing up on Lau­rence Less­ing might be more impor­tant than learn­ing to draw.  The next chal­lenges will be con­trol­ling and releas­ing for con­trol what we make.