Maeda's SIMPLICITY

German to English

Earlier this month I went to Berlin to receive the Raymond Loewy Foundation's Lucky Strike Designer Award. Raymond Loewy was one of the early industrial designers that popularized a style known as "streamlining," and he was a major influence while I was working on my PhD. My research interests then were on how artists and designers created motion -- either with explicit moving parts or with cues that implied dynamism. Loewy borrowed visual elements from the jet age such as fins and aerodynamic curves and translated them to the consumer landscape. Probably his best known example is the iconic glass Coca-Cola bottle.

The presenter of the award was Claudia Roth, the head of the Green political party in Germany. Her speech was in German, but she was kind enough to give me a translated text in English. She talked about the late German sociologist Niklas Luhmann and his "reduction of complexity" in his systems theory as manifested in "every meaningful utterance and every form of designation." I don't mean to misinterpret Luhmann, but I saw the upside of his theories as the accessibility of simplicity to anyone and by anyone.

My impression of Berlin was that everyone was so darn smart there. On the trip to the airport, my driver instigated a discussion of the metaphysical properties of being and I knew that I was simply outclassed. Fortunately the US Customs official let me back into the States with a simple, "Welcome back." instead of a Nietzche quote.