Simplicity - Maeda vs. Bauhaus

Summer is here - with a blissful and springlike freshness (it is of course still spring) - and I am reading a book a friend gave me the other day. It is John Maeda’s “The Laws of Simplicity”, Cambridge, 2006. It is a fine little book. And although my friend did not enjoy it too much - and although it had not been on top of my list - it has won me over at second glance. Or to be more precise: as soon as the sun came out. ‘The Laws of Simplicty’ is a weighty title for a hundred page reader. It could have also been called ‘All the Laws of Simplicity’ or ‘Everything you ever need to know about Simplicity’ because it is neither. And here is the good news: it does not want to be. - It is more the artist Maeda than the MIT professor who is writing here - or most probably it is both, and that of course places him on a most dangerous and most interesting borderline.

John Maeda’s Simplicity

Ever since John Maeda embarked on his search for the ‘laws’ behind those things he likes - the things that speak to him - it felt like a fun project to me. He had started with a web project called ‘Simplicity’. The introduction was telling the reader that Maeda is filling his blog with writings on the subject in search of the - I think it were 19 - laws. Once he had found them he would stop the project immediately and would erase all data from the web server. Fun story - and a clever way of creating some hype for his blog and even a more clever way of giving the medium some gravity - making it more tangible and solid and more appropriate for himself to use it for writing and thinking so it seems. - Strange that of all people it is exactly the digital man John Maeda who needs this trick. - Strange that of all people John Maeda feels the need to give the net an almost tangible quality by reducing the time it will carry his messages. The platform by the way still exists and - to my information - all laws have not been found. But that does not matter. Of course not, because the trick has served its purpose. It created a canvas solid enough for Maeda to draw his ideas on. - Funny thing.

Let’s talk about the ‘artistic’ quality of his book. It is solid, consistent, written with a heartfelt relevance and a lot of joy. Little essays and observations crafted into a phenomenology of simplicity. Things and situations that have got their simplistic quality through reduction, organization, through time (savings in time and reduction of time(!) - funny enough there is nothing written about his wonderful blog trick), through learning, through knowledge… and so on, and so on. The ‘law of organization’ holds a twinkle of the eye for the reader because his book would have been a lot less ’simple’ if Maeda would not have imposed the structure of his ten commandments onto the writing. Relieved we note consistency of content and form.

Reading this book though it becomes apparent that Maeda is a surface man: How does simplicity look? How does it feel? How do you organize the surface to achieve the kind of sensation that Maeda calls ’simplicity’?

One other aspect remains completely untouched: How to get from a complex task or briefing to a result that is simply ‘beautiful’ and ‘alive’ in its very own right? - How to get from a thousand questions to the one solution that answers them all? - How to get to good design?

At many points in his small book Maeda would have had the chance to open the discussion towards this direction - but he does not. When he talks about his mother for example - who hates everything plain and cold and finds beauty more in fringes, ornaments and in an overflow of colors - it is not hard to imagine products that are both simple - even simplistic - and carry all the qualities she would be looking for. The product range of ALESSI for example holds enough items that attract all different kinds of people with all different kinds of aesthetic preferences at the very same time for totally different reasons. (One can also think of products from Charles and Ray Eames for example or many others.) - Products like that - which keep their attraction and dignity more or less regardless of cultural contexts and time - are of course regarded as classics. - And they are perceived as classics because they have an incorruptible core - they have a heart and soul that prevails.

Where does this heart and soul come from? Is it just attribution or is it really in the end more about a solid and totally inherent quality? - This of course is a question for the philosophers… And in a way it would have been a question for John Maeda too I guess. - Still: let us try to take over at this point - not strictly in a philosophical manner - but with a step back into the history of industrial design.

The Bauhaus Simplicity

What strikes you the most when you first approach the rich body of work created in the famous Bauhaus School - most notably under Walter Gropius from 1919 to 1928 in Weimar and Dessau - is the sheer variety of styles. You find carpets that you probably would have more expected to be the work of Native Americans somewhere near Santa Fe. You find the almost ironical shapes and colors of Oskar Schlemmer and you find the artist Paul Klee searching for truth in nature and examining the driving growth of plants for example. You find experiments of all colors, form and shape coming from all different kinds of intellectual backgrounds. What we today call the ‘Bauhaus style’ is a historical consequence. It is the tiny gateway of the so-called modern world - it is the tiny gateway of early- or mid-stage mass production that gave the Bauhaus style its direction. Its roots though do not lie in the square angle. Its roots lie in industrialization that had to be used - or tamed - for the better of mankind.

Few things had shaken Europe quite as much as the First World War (1914-1918) and the Russian October Revolution (1917): industrialized killing in the battlefields, mass poverty and a radical workers movement on the rise. Industrialization was finally and completely off the leach. In this climate the Bauhaus School was founded 1919 in Weimar in Germany. In bringing art and industry together the Bauhaus had predecessors (the German Werkbund for example was founded 1907) and parallel movements (like the Dutch De Stijl founded in 1917) but there was something special about Gropius’ approach. In his Bauhaus Manifest he puts the craftsman on the same level as the artist thus giving the artist all tools of modern production and giving the craftsman the self-concept of an artist: to reach for no less than to reflect and shape the world.

The Bauhaus movement and the Bauhaus style cannot be understood without the reference to its contexts: the fact that Germany did not have natural resources in abundance and had to focus on efficiency and on the refinement of output, - the possibilities and tools of industrial production, - but also the terrible consequences of industrialization.

A very special - a metaphysical - consequence of industrialization was the lack of ‘character’ in artifacts that were produced at the turn of the century - so the German sociologist Georg Simmel notes in his book “The Philosophy of Money” (1900). Describing the modern world Georg Simmel used two main categories ‘The Subjective’ (which by his definition is connected to one human being, to a single creator, to a certain point of view) and ‘The Objective’ (the truly rational which is incorporated in natural sciences, in technology, mass production and in the logic of money). Simmel stated that driven by the unstoppable power of numbers society is moving from a ’subjective’ culture (where everything could be traced down to its conscious creator) to an ‘objective’ culture (where culture as a whole is essentially anonymous). His abstract thoughts become tangible in the examples he uses to explain them. When you look at a chair that comes from a craftsman’s workshop for example, Simmel says, you can feel a certain quality, you can feel the hand of a conscious creator, you can feel character. The new world, he continues, has nothing like that. It is in its essence fragmented - like shared labor and money itself. - Simmel also portraits the modern man. He looks at the managers, the bankers in Berlin and he sees that they are moved by something different - by something new. He looks at the new artifacts and he finds proof of his theory all around. These products are fragmented, he says, they have fractures everywhere. The new world comes with many advantages but also leaves behind the one thing that we humans love so much: the reflection of ourselves: character. “Isn’t it”, Simmel notes “that we as humans – maybe not with every right – want all things to have a distinct character?” In our modern world though we will search for a little sign of ‘character’ and all that we will find will have the taste of money, of numbers, and of management decisions.

From Fragmentation to Character

“Where does the heart and soul of products come from?” we asked earlier. “Is it just attribution or is it really in the end more about a solid and totally inherent quality?”
In a way Simmel opened the subject now for a metaphysical discussion. And in a way the Bauhaus gave us the answer.

By turning industry into an artist’s tool Simmel’s dilemma could be solved. In bringing together the knowledge of engineers, the interest of managers, accountants and - of course - the interests of users, and in understanding it as one interconnected system that these new artists/craftsmen had to understand and shape, a ’subjective’ quality was brought to an ‘objective’ world.
If design is about anything, it is about context (or the inverted form of context: consequence).

From Context to Simplicity

“How to get from a thousand questions to the one solution that answers them all? - How to get to good design?” we also asked.

And now we can also come up with an idea:

If the complexity of our world, if the magnitude of interconnected interests and factors holds the tendency of being counterproductive to ‘character’, we can only create something meaningful - and something lovable at the same time - if we have the ability to zoom out. - We can only find the one solution if we look at all the questions.

Design is about creation under constraints. - Or better: Design is about creation with the help of constraints.

And so - if wanting to - one could even formulate a new law of simplicity: The only way to simplicity is through context and complexity. The more you research the contexts, the more relevant constraints you find, the sooner you reach the one solution.

From Theory to Practice

Anybody who has ever been in a design briefing knows about the fragmentations of our modern world. Anybody who has ever been to a second meeting with two new people on the client side knows this even better. And anybody who has ever given up after the third meeting and has still continued with the assignment also knows how design by compromise looks and feels: it has fractures more than one can count.

From this standpoint we can see that good design is always about simplicity - no matter the shape or form. Design - any good design - is about simplicity because it reduces the worst of complexity.

It is the job of a designer to reduce complexity: the complexity of a multitude of interests - the complexity of management - into something that has ‘character’ - into something that humans can actually relate to. - What you have is a product that satisfies the accountant, the consumer, the government, the environment, the sales force… - what you see is something that answers to all of this and to nothing at the same time - because it is simply ‘beautiful’ - it simply is ‘creation’ in its very own right.

In an ultimately interconnected world it is the job of the designer to respond to all the different interests that articulate themselves - or that even do not articulate themselves - and to come up with a solution that bares no witness to either of them. No traces of sweat, headache, and endless meeting room sessions want to be found.

In a world where - for many reasons - design has hit the agenda big time it is the job of the manager - even more the job of the design manager - to provide the framework for this kind of simplicity to happen.

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jkh

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http://weblogs.media.mit.edu/SIMPLICITY/
http://www.amazon.com/Laws-Simplicity-Design-Technology-Business/dp/0262134721
http://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Money-Georg-Simmel/dp/0415341728

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