Maeda's SIMPLICITY

a... ah ... ATCHOO! Gestaltung!

In Japan when you sneeze in a public area, you won't hear a single peep from others. Whereas in the U.S. you can sneeze in places where not a single soul knows you and complete strangers will offer a "God bless you!" or a "Gesundheit!" Perhaps because the origins of the Western offering of a "Gesundheit" connects with an age-old superstition having to do with the potential loss of your soul with the violent action of the sneeze. That's a nice thought—next time you're on the subway see how many souls you can save. However by doing so you're more likely to catch a cold, and will eventually need your soul to be saved as well. It seems to all even out in a good way ... this germ-spirit economy we live in.

Gestalt psychology was something that I've heard of for quite a long time, but I never really understood it all that well. The only reason why it has stayed in my mind this long is the similarity between "gesundheit" and "gestalt," which was made even easier when I learned that the German word for design is "gestaltung"—3 syllables for 3 syllables cemented this word (at least lexically) forever.

Like all ideas that are deep and forbiddenly difficult to master, I held on to the one thing that did make sense to me beyond the name. That was the "grouping" principle of Gestalt psychology. It basically goes like this: What's the difference between a cluster of 30 dots expressed as displayed on the left, versus the dots on the right?

        

The answer is pretty simple. On the left there is no order to the randomly placed dots; on the right there is a clear grouping of some of the dots. We immediately pick out the group of dots as a "whole," even though it's composed of many little dots. In effect by gathering the dots into the group as on the right, we have simplified the otherwise haphazard display of 30 dots.

Let's place this principle into context with my favorite example of the Apple iPod. When it first came out, the controls were layed out as follows:

Then, perhaps as a cost reduction technique, or due to complaints from people with fat fingers, in a subsequent version of the iPod Apple separated the four buttons surrounding the jog dial into a discrete row of buttons:

As a result, they made the iPod more complex. The comfortable grouping of all the functions in the center made the newer iPod look significantly more complex to use. Until this morning I couldn't figure out why I ran out to buy one of the older iPods when this version with the button row came out. I was extremly irate and couldn't explain why! Now I know ... because they made something beautifully simple, unnecessarily complex.

In the newest version, they have oscillated towards extreme simplicity by integrating all of the buttons into a single seamless control:

Let's look at all three of them side by side now:

          

From left to right we can read this sequence of iPod evolutionary steps as "starting simple, then getting complex, and finally becoming over-simple." What do I mean by "over-simple"? I mean that you can simplify to the point where you simplification has been made obvious. This has the same effect as yelling at someone, "Look dummy, I'm simpler!" Let's illustrate by going back to my dot diagrams:

              

The diagram at the right shows the explicit grouping of the cluster of dots by smooshing them together. This has the advantage of complete explicitness of simplification, but also (as visualized by the diagram) means that the individual functions that could once be identified as unique, are now not as cognitively accessible than before smooshing occured. Which brings us to the First Law of Simplicity:

That will work for the time being. I got started on this Gestalt path this morning when I implemented a way to visualize how many people might be reading this blog regularly per hour. When you choose viewing by 'group' or 'line' the difference in your perception of quantity is quite striking.