Simple and Complex
October 7th, 2008[ Software Development ]
At Brainpark, we stuck the words “smart, simple software” on our cards. Simple, what’s simple? The word on it’s own offers little to act on. You need a context to put your product into to assess. Christopher Alexander talks about context and form. The challenge of the designer being to achieve fitness between form and context.
Back to John Maeda who describes the balance between simplicity and complexity as….
How simple can you make it?….versus….How complex does it have to be?
“On the one hand, you want a product or service to be easy to use; on the other hand you want it to do everything that a person might want it to do….The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction. When in doubt, remove. But be careful what you remove.”
It’s easy to get lost focusing on form and forget the context you place it in. Simplicity and complexity only really have meaning with both form and context.