Maeda's SIMPLICITY

Educating Simplicity

A tiny digital camera's manuals outweighs those of a car.

After getting the dreaded "E18" error message on my Canon camera, I decided to use my MIT training in Electrical Engineering to try to fix it. A brilliant fellow has posted complete instructions as to how to attack the disassembling of a Canon IXUS which is similar to the one that I had. I decided to go for it. Problem was that after the first few steps, I noticed that the difference between the camera under study and mine was significantly different. Subsequently, I did take the entire camera apart, but without the intention of putting it back together again. Operation "Humpty Dumpty" was successful to a degree—I learned a few things about digital cameras through Humpty's unfortunate and premature demise.

My freshly ordered replacement camera came yesterday. I ordered the exact same model and wasn't tempted to go up to 7 megapixels as I am a humble 3 megapixels guy. I had forgotten how much literature the little bugger came with. Granted that there's a lot of multilingual overlap in the pile of paper, but it's definitely grand in heft. In comparison, a recent comparison with my stack of manuals for an autombile revealed that the digital camera was essentially more complex than the car!

That's not a fair comparison of course. To drive a car, you must undergo formal instruction. Either through a set of classes or a much thicker 'manual' of instruction or the undoing of your parent that is forced to sit in the passenger's seat while you tempt fate as the dreaded student driver.

I don't recall taking a 'digital camera operation' class in high school, thus the increase in complexity of manuals is probably deserved. Such a class is of course unnecessary for younger people as evidenced by my 3-year older that seems to have no problem operating my digital camera. Hands-on experience certainly beats reading a manual.

Which brings us to the fourth law of simplicity,

The more you know about something beforehand,
the simpler it will ultimately be perceived.
Thus education or any other investment in training is a valuable step towards battling complexity. The only problem is, of course, that learning hard things ain't easy. Making learning simple is thus a key goal to be realized.

Posted by maeda at April 6, 2005 02:33 PM