Today at lunch with Hiroshi Ishii we talked about our favorite simplicity topic: monofunction vs polyfunction. Ishii's seminal work in ambient devices led towards the development of the Media Lab spinoff Ambient Devices led by design-technology visionary David Rose. Our debate was about one of their new products called the "5 Day Weather Forecaster" versus their original product the "Stock Orb." Both products use Ambient's innovative wireless pager-based network for operation—which is subscription rate-free (which is important for people tired of monthly service fees like myself).
Stock Orb was designed around the simple idea of a re-configurable "one-pixel display." Map the upcoming weather of your vicinity to a color: blue for clear skies, or red for upcoming storms. You can also map your stock portfolio status, or any other web-accessible data item to the Stock Orb. In essence, the Stock Orb is a polyfunctional device with only a single operating function at a given time.
Times have changed with their new weather forecaster device as it only shows the weather. Well, at least it shows 5 days worth of weather. As a result, it really is an object much simpler than the orb. Yet is it better? No. Is it simpler? yes. Is it simplistic? Yes. And for those people that need such a device, simplistic is completely sufficient.
Going back to the orb, even though it is less simple than the weather forecaster, it is much richer in functionality—in spite of its simplicity. Maintaining this balance between simplistic-ness and rich-ness is the sweet spot for designing for simplicity.
Posted by maeda at December 21, 2004 01:53 PM