The Conquest of Complexity

Last week’s The Economist survey was about making technology more simple to end-users and mastering complexity being the next big thing in the IT business. It analyses the cuases of technological complexity both for firm and for consumers,evaluate the main efforts toward simplication by IT and telecom vendors today, and consider what the growing demands for simplicity mean for thes industries. I underlined a few quotes:

Ethnology and technology
Today, some 70% of the world’s population are “analogues”, who are terrified by tehcnology, Another 15% are “digital immigrants”, typically thirty-somethings whos adopted technology as young adults; and other 15% are “digital navites”, young adults who have never known and cannot imagine life without IM.

The biggest problem is that most of the people who create these artefacts are nerds, I want to see more artists create these things. The geekiness that predominates in the early stages of any nes technology leads to a nastay affliction called “featurits” This violates a crucial principal of design (man is most free when his tools are proportionate to his needs).

Anthropology and technology
Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist who works for Intel was especially struck by the differences in how westerners and Asians view their homes. Amercians tended to say things like “my home is my castle” and furnish it as a self-contained playground. Asians were more likely to tell her that “my home is a place of hamrnony”, “grace”, “simplicity” or “huminility”. [...] For Americans, adopting technology is an expression of American-ness, part of the story of modernity and progress. For many other people, it may be just a hassle, or downright pretentious.

Complexity and technology
You have to push all the complexity to the back end in order to make the front end very simple (example of the cars and households 100 years ago …).

The way we get rid of complexity is by creating new layers of abstraction and sedimenting what is below.