4 ms·

Simplicity

77 points by brianchu 14y ago

gklitt 14y ago
I found it quite a stretch to call manufacturing exactly identical iPhones "truly one of our civilization’s greatest accomplishments". An impressive feat, to be sure, but pretty far down there on my "greatest accomplishments of civilization" list, after democracy, basic medicine, space exploration, etc. The general point is a good one though! It's true that simplicity is often invoked as an excuse for laziness, and authentic simplicity can be very difficult to achieve. I think that developers/designers sometimes confuse simplicity of their process with simplicity of the end result. The latter is really all that matters.
- francispedraza 14y ago
  Hi, I'm the author. Thanks for your thoughts. Think about it less literally. Remember the part where the machine choses from one of 725 variations on a part? Think about all that goes behind that. It's the accumulation of decades of hard work that has led to technological advances in manufacturing processes and hardware designs to lead to this moment. No other civilization in history could have dreamt of manufacturing something so refined on this scale, so (relatively) cheaply. And think about the historical macro-scale of the iPhone and Mobile in general. The Massai warrior in Kenya has more information in his phone than Nixon did in the White house. That is a civilization-scale accomplishment.
  - ShirtlessRod 14y ago
    If you want to point to general manufacturing processes and advancements as one of "civilization's greatest accomplishments", that's one thing, but you appear to be specifically talking about the iPhone as if that product itself is anywhere near a greatest accomplishment of civilization.
    - ricardobeat 14y ago
      The iPhone is arguably the most sophisticated consumer device ever produced, and so it represents general manufacturing advancements quite well.
    - r4dius 14y ago
      I didn't read it as such, but can understand how it could have come off that way. The author seemed to be speaking with enough generality that each example was just a pit stop along the much broader thread of the post.
- jackcviers3 14y ago
  I think you are not fully realizing the changes the world has undergone in the last twelve years. The convergence of Moore's law, nearly ubiquitous internet connectivity, Google, interaction design, machine intelligence, solid state storage, cheap, precise manufacturing, and hardware/software efficiency that produced something like the iPhone is a monumental human achievement. Think about how it has changed the way you work, the way you travel, the way you learn, the way you communicate, and the way you entertain yourself. Don't know something? Let's google it. I'll pull my microcomputer out of my pocket, connect to this vast storage of data that comprises nearly every fact that has ever been discovered, query it by keyword, download and render it to a screen that I can manipulate with my fingers as if the things on it were tangible, read/view/watch it, and share it with hundreds or thousands of people instantly. It was science fiction when I graduated high school at the millennium. Now, people consider it as common as newsprint.
  - state 14y ago
    "This newfound state of No Future is, in my opinion, a very good thing. It indicates a kind of maturity, an understanding that every future is someone else’s past, every present someone else’s future. Upon arriving in the capital-F Future, we discover it, invariably, to be the lower-case now." - William Gibson
    - adrianhoward 14y ago
      "If the future is dead, then today we must summon it and learn how to see it properly" - Warren Ellis http://t.co/eicOEwEP http://t.co/eicOEwEP
francispedraza 14y ago
Thanks to whoever added this to Hacker News! Great to find it here.
jhuckestein 14y ago
The author quotes Jony Ive on simplicity. There's a great interview he did with the telegraph on simplicity: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/9283706/Jonathan-Ive-interview-simplicity-isnt-simple.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/9283706/Jonathan... My favorit quote is "Simplicity is not the absence of clutter, that's a consequence of simplicity. Simplicity is somehow essentially describing the purpose and place of an object and product. The absence of clutter is just a clutter-free product. That's not simple."
brianchu 14y ago
My takeaway was that simplicity = precision, not elimination.
michaelkscott 14y ago
The best Simplicity Loving all the great minimally titled posts coming out of sbvtle lately.
bithive123 14y ago
How are readers supposed to approach this piece? The tone reminds me of Morpheus from The Matrix. I know we live in the age of "tl;dr", but the formatting demonstrates the piece's assertion that "Less, for the sake of less, is not more." I should probably regard it as a poem of sorts, but as a series of assertions it basically tells us that in order to advance the state of the art (which has come so far that things once thought impossible feel simple) we must be willing to spend a lot of effort solving hard problems. The rest of the piece tries so hard at profundity that it ends up being mundane.
- jakejake 14y ago
  I don't claim to have ever achieved perfection with anything I've done. But I can say from experience of designing a lot of systems, that the initial designs are usually messy and complicated. A lot of developers stop there and start building. But if you keep going, at a certain point things start to become simple and obvious. That's how I know I've managed to get to the core of some certain problem. It's a great feeling when all of a sudden the design or approach seems to just fit perfectly. I don't really know how to get there except to just continue re-working things until that magic moment happens.
adrianhoward 14y ago
I don't claim this as any great insight - but I've been finding using 'sharp' or 'precise' as a description useful instead of 'simple' when talking with clients about UX and UI design. It doesn't cover quite the same ground as 'simple' - but it seems much easier to talk about. Simple is one of those words that means radically different things to different people. Minimal. Easy. Monotone. Etc. Folk who liked the OP would probably find the book The Laws Of Simplicity by John Maeda of interest http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/laws-simplicity http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/laws-simplicity. It's more a series of extended blog-post style essays around simplicity than it is a unifying framework of laws - but I still found it a thought provoking read. Short too ;-)
queryly 14y ago
love the article. I would add that simplicity is just the right amount of abstraction. a little more becomes complex. a little less becomes incomprehensible.
6ren 14y ago
1. Simplicity is removal of redundancy. 2. More redundancy can be revealed by expanding scope. 3. The ideal scope size is what can be reasoned about independently and specified independently from the rest (there's a global optimisation problem here, of trade-offs between the scopes of adjacent parts). 4. The scope for measuring redundancy can also be expanded, to include all things reasoned about and specified by a person. This enables us to account for specification techniques which are complex in themselves (in an absolute sense), but which improve simplicity overall, by being applicable in many situations (generalised) - they can remove redundancy across unrelated domains by factoring it out. an information-theoretic perspective
weavejester 14y ago
I prefer the definition of simplicity proposed by Rich Hickey in Simple Made Easy: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy It's a more concrete and historically accurate definition than the vague description supplied in the article.
Osmium 14y ago
"Albert Einstein achieved simplicity. He dared to unravel the mysteries of the universe. He arrived at E=MC²." What does this even mean? Einstein's theories are perhaps elegant, but simple?
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

77 points by brianchu 14y ago

I found it quite a stretch to call manufacturing exactly identical iPhones "truly one of our civilization’s greatest accomplishments". An impressive feat, to be sure, but pretty far down there on my "greatest accomplishments of civilization" list, after democracy, basic medicine, space exploration, etc. The general point is a good one though! It's true that simplicity is often invoked as an excuse for laziness, and authentic simplicity can be very difficult to achieve. I think that developers/designers sometimes confuse simplicity of their process with simplicity of the end result. The latter is really all that matters.

francispedraza 14y ago
Hi, I'm the author. Thanks for your thoughts. Think about it less literally. Remember the part where the machine choses from one of 725 variations on a part? Think about all that goes behind that. It's the accumulation of decades of hard work that has led to technological advances in manufacturing processes and hardware designs to lead to this moment. No other civilization in history could have dreamt of manufacturing something so refined on this scale, so (relatively) cheaply. And think about the historical macro-scale of the iPhone and Mobile in general. The Massai warrior in Kenya has more information in his phone than Nixon did in the White house. That is a civilization-scale accomplishment.
- ShirtlessRod 14y ago
  If you want to point to general manufacturing processes and advancements as one of "civilization's greatest accomplishments", that's one thing, but you appear to be specifically talking about the iPhone as if that product itself is anywhere near a greatest accomplishment of civilization.
  - ricardobeat 14y ago
    The iPhone is arguably the most sophisticated consumer device ever produced, and so it represents general manufacturing advancements quite well.
  - r4dius 14y ago
    I didn't read it as such, but can understand how it could have come off that way. The author seemed to be speaking with enough generality that each example was just a pit stop along the much broader thread of the post.
jackcviers3 14y ago
I think you are not fully realizing the changes the world has undergone in the last twelve years. The convergence of Moore's law, nearly ubiquitous internet connectivity, Google, interaction design, machine intelligence, solid state storage, cheap, precise manufacturing, and hardware/software efficiency that produced something like the iPhone is a monumental human achievement. Think about how it has changed the way you work, the way you travel, the way you learn, the way you communicate, and the way you entertain yourself. Don't know something? Let's google it. I'll pull my microcomputer out of my pocket, connect to this vast storage of data that comprises nearly every fact that has ever been discovered, query it by keyword, download and render it to a screen that I can manipulate with my fingers as if the things on it were tangible, read/view/watch it, and share it with hundreds or thousands of people instantly. It was science fiction when I graduated high school at the millennium. Now, people consider it as common as newsprint.
- state 14y ago
  "This newfound state of No Future is, in my opinion, a very good thing. It indicates a kind of maturity, an understanding that every future is someone else’s past, every present someone else’s future. Upon arriving in the capital-F Future, we discover it, invariably, to be the lower-case now." - William Gibson
  - adrianhoward 14y ago
    "If the future is dead, then today we must summon it and learn how to see it properly" - Warren Ellis http://t.co/eicOEwEP http://t.co/eicOEwEP

francispedraza 14y ago

Thanks to whoever added this to Hacker News! Great to find it here.

jhuckestein 14y ago

The author quotes Jony Ive on simplicity. There's a great interview he did with the telegraph on simplicity: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/9283706/Jonathan-Ive-interview-simplicity-isnt-simple.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/9283706/Jonathan... My favorit quote is "Simplicity is not the absence of clutter, that's a consequence of simplicity. Simplicity is somehow essentially describing the purpose and place of an object and product. The absence of clutter is just a clutter-free product. That's not simple."

brianchu 14y ago

My takeaway was that simplicity = precision, not elimination.

michaelkscott 14y ago

The best Simplicity Loving all the great minimally titled posts coming out of sbvtle lately.

bithive123 14y ago

How are readers supposed to approach this piece? The tone reminds me of Morpheus from The Matrix. I know we live in the age of "tl;dr", but the formatting demonstrates the piece's assertion that "Less, for the sake of less, is not more." I should probably regard it as a poem of sorts, but as a series of assertions it basically tells us that in order to advance the state of the art (which has come so far that things once thought impossible feel simple) we must be willing to spend a lot of effort solving hard problems. The rest of the piece tries so hard at profundity that it ends up being mundane.

jakejake 14y ago
I don't claim to have ever achieved perfection with anything I've done. But I can say from experience of designing a lot of systems, that the initial designs are usually messy and complicated. A lot of developers stop there and start building. But if you keep going, at a certain point things start to become simple and obvious. That's how I know I've managed to get to the core of some certain problem. It's a great feeling when all of a sudden the design or approach seems to just fit perfectly. I don't really know how to get there except to just continue re-working things until that magic moment happens.

adrianhoward 14y ago

I don't claim this as any great insight - but I've been finding using 'sharp' or 'precise' as a description useful instead of 'simple' when talking with clients about UX and UI design. It doesn't cover quite the same ground as 'simple' - but it seems much easier to talk about. Simple is one of those words that means radically different things to different people. Minimal. Easy. Monotone. Etc. Folk who liked the OP would probably find the book The Laws Of Simplicity by John Maeda of interest http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/laws-simplicity http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/laws-simplicity. It's more a series of extended blog-post style essays around simplicity than it is a unifying framework of laws - but I still found it a thought provoking read. Short too ;-)

queryly 14y ago

love the article. I would add that simplicity is just the right amount of abstraction. a little more becomes complex. a little less becomes incomprehensible.

6ren 14y ago

1. Simplicity is removal of redundancy. 2. More redundancy can be revealed by expanding scope. 3. The ideal scope size is what can be reasoned about independently and specified independently from the rest (there's a global optimisation problem here, of trade-offs between the scopes of adjacent parts). 4. The scope for measuring redundancy can also be expanded, to include all things reasoned about and specified by a person. This enables us to account for specification techniques which are complex in themselves (in an absolute sense), but which improve simplicity overall, by being applicable in many situations (generalised) - they can remove redundancy across unrelated domains by factoring it out. an information-theoretic perspective

weavejester 14y ago

I prefer the definition of simplicity proposed by Rich Hickey in Simple Made Easy: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy It's a more concrete and historically accurate definition than the vague description supplied in the article.

Osmium 14y ago

"Albert Einstein achieved simplicity. He dared to unravel the mysteries of the universe. He arrived at E=MC²." What does this even mean? Einstein's theories are perhaps elegant, but simple?

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]