SIMPLICITY—the art of complexity


'John Maeda John Maeda

A simple life. It seems like something we would all like to have. But like everything you don’t have and desire, once you get what you want, boredom inevitably sets in. The hustle and bustle of daily work motivates you to go on a vacation and relax. Simplicity achieved. But after relaxation has settled in, complexity beckons. There has to be more to life! So we douse ourselves with complexity and continue the ritual of complexity, simplicity, complexity, simplicity, complexity until at the very end of our lives when by no longer existing we achieve the ultimate in simplicity—nonexistence.

On the surface, all artistic practices support complexity: the addition of a concept to the visual, auditory, or tactile realm. However some art, although additive to the universe of concepts and objects around us, helps to simplify the world by having a subtracting effect more than it adds to the surrounds. Technology art, in particular that which pertains to the computer as opposed to purely kinetic art, is generally neither simple nor complex. It is both. And that is what makes technology art difficult to fit comfortably into any previous genre. It’s complex: there are cryptic instructions and rituals required to maintain and interact with most technology art. It’s simple: many of the codes used to create technology art are trivial in comparison to the complex experiences they synthesize. If asked to choose whether to have a traditional oil painting or a computational art piece hanging in my living room, I would choose the painting for simplicity’s sake. But I’m unlikely to be in my living room and enjoy the painting, because I am usually in front of my computer—which has become the living room of most contemporary minds.

To embrace the computer’s world is to accept complexity at a level that we truly cannot comprehend. The computer screen deceives us with its array of pixels—we believe that we are seeing the entire picture that the computer sees. But we’re not. What is on the screen only represents a minority of the thought processes active at any given moment on the computer. We are only catching the merest glimpse of the swirl and torment of the computer’s mind. The simplicity of the computer’s interface helps us sit atop the complexities rampant inside the computer. Do we really want to dip deeper into its inner chaos?

I used to believe that programming was an important skill for any technology artist. I no longer believe that. I still believe that it’s a critical set of concepts to master of course, but not for the objective of creating technology art. Computer programming is limited in ways that have always bothered me. But you need to understand programming to say that. A new generation of programming languages or paradigms has to emerge before we can finally harness the power of the computer. I do not know what these new systems will look or feel like. To get there, we will have to master the understanding of complexity, or the art of complexity as is the title of this year’s Ars Electronica symposium.

The stellar international panel of speakers that we have invited will all speak about various aspects of simplicity, and undoubtedly complexity. How do we live? How will we live? What do we fear? What do we desire? The discussion, I expect, will become extremely complex. And then, it is my hope, we will begin to see the connections that bind any discussion from multiple disciplines on simplicity. We will organize, reduce, and synthesize a body of knowledge together as a trusted panel, with the hope that participants can make the choice themselves regarding their path to simplicity, or complexity.

I recently finished the writing of a new book, entitled The Laws of Simplicity, which is available for the first time in Europe here at Ars Electronica. People ask me to summarize the book in a few sentences. I find this difficult, as I know simplicity to be such a complex subject. In short the book is about my own personal perspectives on simplicity, as communicated through ten laws on how we value simplicity. For example, the Third Law TIME is “Savings in time feel like simplicity.” I open my discussion of the Third Law in The Laws of Simplicity as follows:

“The average person spends at least an hour a day waiting in line. Add to this the uncountable seconds, minutes, weeks spent waiting for something that might have no line at all.

Some of that waiting is subtle. We wait for water to come out of the faucet when we turn the knob. We wait for water on the stove to boil, and start to feel impatient. We wait for the seasons to change. Some of the waiting we do is less subtle, and can often be tense or annoying: waiting for a Web page to load, waiting in bumper-to-bumper traffic, or waiting for the results of a dreaded medical test.

No one likes to suffer the frustration of waiting. Thus all of us, consumers and companies alike, often try to find ways to beat the ticking hand of time. We go out of our way to find the quickest option or any other means to reduce our frustration. When any interaction with products or service providers happens quickly, we attribute this efficiency to the perceived simplicity of experience.

Achieving notable efficiencies in speed are exemplified by overnight delivery services like FedEx and even the ordering process for a McDonald’s hamburger. When forced to wait, life seems unnecessarily complex. Savings in time feel like simplicity. And we are thankfully loyal when it happens, which is rare.

Then there’s the implicit benefit: reducing the time spent waiting translates into time we can spend on something else. In the end it’s about choosing how we spend the time we’re given in life. Shaving ten minutes off of your commute home translates to ten more minutes with your loved ones. Thus a reduced wait is an invaluable reward not only with respect to business, but also to life and your well-being.”(1)

(1)
From John Maeda, The Laws of Simplicity, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 2006, p.26 zurück