Ayse Birsel spoke at our recent SIMPLICITY event (moblogged by AARP's Futurist Mike Lee from March 23 to March 25) on my favorite topic (you can guess what that is). She shared a variety of development sketches regarding her radical office partitioning system Resolve. Ayse expressed her general philosophy of design as one of "combining two things that are different, and resolving them as one." How to reconcile the dualities in life such that differences dissolve are a certain special power of Ayse's most certainly as is visible in her ouvre of work. She suggested that the approach of limiting (or simplifying) the contexts that surround us results in the reduction to a simpler vocabulary, that can often expand endlessly if correctly selected.
Steve Whittaker from BT who recently co-edited a collection of research papers from the Media Lab expressed his approach to simplicity as one of taking any complex space of activity, literally carving out a significant segment, and replacing that segment with a newly designed, simpler part. He described this approach as one of incredible risk–because often times the new part does not behave properly and can bring down the entire system. We can draw a similarity to Steve's approach in the area of transplanting a mechanical heart into a human patient. The human is extremely complex. The mechanical hearts today are increasingly simple. But the new heart can be rejected, resulting in catastrophic failures (read 'death').
I haven't quite digested this food for thought above, and am just presenting it while it sits in the gastric juices of my brain. Kind of like sashimi for the mind ... without the wasabi or soy sauce.
The topic of this week is loosely a summary of different insights gathered from our recent Cape Cod event.
Posted by maeda at March 28, 2005 06:35 AM