“c.1220, ‘humble, ignorant,’ from O.Fr. simple, from L. simplus ‘single,’ variant of simplex. Sense evolved to ‘lowly, common’ (c.1280), then ‘mere, pure’ (c.1303)…” READ ➲

“A few people have been talking about Simplicity recently. How it is overrated. How it makes your product rubbish. Bollocks. Simplicity is not about how few features you have. It’s about feature selection.” MORE ➲

Albert Einstein: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” MORE âž²

“The primary aesthetic concept at the heart of traditional Japanese culture is the value of harmony in all things. The Japanese world view is nature-based and concerned with the beauty of studied simplicity and harmony with nature.” MORE ➲

“Many of us carry a few preconceived notions about simplicity. We assume things that are easy to use don’t have a lot of options and, as a result, shouldn’t appear cluttered when we first encounter them.” MORE ➲

“A project to make businesses more aware of their customer experience, and how to fix it.” VIEW ➲

“A key tenet of the Zen aesthetic is kanso or simplicity. In the kanso concept beauty, grace, and visual elegance are achieved by elimination and omission. Says artist, designer and architect, Dr. Koichi Kawana, ‘Simplicity means the achievement of maximum effect with minimum means.’ When you examine your [presentation] visuals, then, can you say that you are getting the maximum impact with a minimum of graphic elements, for example? When you take a look at Jobs’ slides and Gates’ slides, how do they compare for kanso?” MORE ➲

“The Simplicity Forum is a think tank of academics and authors, activist and artists, educators and entrepreneurs who seek to promote simplicity in our work and practice it in our lives. Together we are committed to achieving and honoring simple, just and sustainable ways of life.”

“Simple living — aka voluntary simplicity — has just about as many definitions as there are individuals who practice it. Simple living is not about living in poverty or self-inflicted deprivation. Rather, it is about living an examined life — one in which you have determined what is important, or ‘enough,’ for you, discarding the rest.” MORE ➲

“The sixteenth-century Japanese tea master and Zen monk, Sen no Rikyu, refined the culture of wabi-sabi… The simplicity of wabi-sabi is best described as the state of grace arrived at by a sober, modest, heartfelt intelligence. The main strategy of this intelligence is economy of means. Pare down to the essence, but don’t remove the poetry.” MORE ➲

“In this site you will find a wide spectrum of resources related to voluntary simplicity, a way of life that addresses the widespread yearning in North America and other western countries for a slower pace of life with more time for joyful relationships, fulfilling work, and living one’s dreams. For some, though not all, people, to live more simply involves working less, wanting less, and spending less.” MORE âž²

“As computers get more powerful, materials more advanced, and methods more sophisticated, it makes sense to move more of the complexity away from users. Shifting complexity puts the burden back on the product designers and developers, who have the difficult task of finding the just-right balance between complexity and usability.” MORE âž²

“At User Interface 11, Barry Schwartz outlined his theory of the relationship between subjective satisfaction (happiness) and the number of choices people have available to them. He pointed out a ‘sweet spot’ on the curve that got the balance of available choices and personal satisfaction just right.” MORE âž²

“I think Google should be like a Swiss Army knife: clean, simple, the tool you want to take everywhere. When you need a certain tool, you can pull these lovely doodads out of it and get what you want. So on Google, rather than showing you upfront that we can do all these things, we give you tips to encourage you to do things these ways. We get you to put your query in the search field, rather than have all these links up front. That’s worked well for us. Like when you see a knife with all 681 functions opened up, you’re terrified.” MORE âž²

“It is innovation’s biggest paradox: We demand more and more from the stuff in our lives–more features, more function, more power–and yet we also increasingly demand that it be easy to use. And, in an Escher-like twist, the technology that’s simplest to use is also, often, the most difficult to create.” MORE âž²

“Recently two notable design advocates, Don Norman and Joel Spolsky, challenged the value of simplicity in design, and I’m here to offer a late defense.” MORE âž²

“A lot of software developers are seduced by the old ‘80/20’ rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies. Unfortunately, it’s never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features.” MORE âž²

“Occam’s razor (also spelled Ockham’s razor) is a principle attributed to the 14th-century English logician and Franciscan friar William of Ockham. The principle states that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating, or ‘shaving off,’ those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory. When given two equally valid explanations for a phenomenon, one should embrace the less complicated formulation… This is often paraphrased as ‘All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one.’” MORE âž²

Don Norman: “Why do we deliberately build things that confuse the people who use them? Answer: Because the people want the features. Because simplicity is a myth whose time has past, if it ever existed.” MORE âž²

Gotta kick things off with this weblog by Prof. John Maeda of the MIT Media Lab. A well-known artist and technologist, Maeda recently wrote a book called “The Laws of Simplicity.” MORE âž²