Of Simplicity, Complexity, Abstraction & Multitasking

It’s another one of those days when many thoughts are converging.  I caught part of a great interview on NPR today:  Talk of the Nation Science Friday, with Andrew Flatow interviewing John Maeda of the MIT Media Lab (one of my heroes).  Maeda spoke about the elegance and impact of beautiful, simple design and how difficult that is for most companies to achieve - a simple technology that works intuitively, with as much thought put toward simplicity in the interworkings as in the exterior interface.    He also spoke about abstraction, and the fact that today’s generations are growing up more capable of dealing with abstractions, using visual interfaces and “keeping a million IM windows open on their computer at the same time”. 

Two things struck me.  First, as our increasing comfort with abstraction as navigation and wayfinding become more visual, it will change the way we comprehend and conceive information, which will change the way we design and build.  Think about it - in decades to come, iconography and three-dimensional representations will replace a great deal of code and language.  If we, as a culture, develop that skill innately, it will open the door to myriad new ideas and inventions.  Think of it as an adjunct skill that will start to come naturally through experience and exposure.  (As Alison pointed out in her comments on Richard’s earlier post, great mathematicians can think abstractly.  Einstein thought about math problems visually.  Imagine if we all had this skill!)

Secondly, I began to think about the visual experience of multi-tasking that happens on a computer when we have so multiple windows open.  Rather than merely intellectually multi-tasking - using memory as our only prompt - there is a physical representation of our activities, on display simultaneously.  How is this going to impact the way we think?  Are there positive behavioral implications?  We talk so much about our ADD society, but I wonder if our brains are plastic enough to change based on this visual analog to our behavior?

Finally, check out a fantastic BusinessWeek article on widgets, the third coming of the internet era.  I’ve been writing about widgets a lot.  If you don’t understand them (and even if you do), this is a great primer - think of it as Distributed Content 101.  Widgets are going to be a critical information management tool as we drive to our own personal webspaces.  Soon, we’ll all have our own individual information hubs - think of it as your personal intelligence center - from which we can do anything and everything we need:  Read, search, interact, shop, bank, learn, manage, communicate.  Widgets will be a way of managing complexity to create a simple interface on your personal site.  It’s worth the time to learn about them. 

And a random thought, while I’m posting:  The Boeing Dreamliner is a great case study in innovation.  While the plane itself is innovative - it uses carbon fiber as its core material vs. traditional aluminum - the process Boeing used to build it is equally innovative, reinforcing that the biggest innovations tend to take place across multiple parts of the innovation cascade and process is just important as product, if not moreso.  The plane was built in pieces globally, in order to manage labor costs and build relationships with future customer countries.  In order to transport parts back to the U.S. for final assembly, an even larger plane had to be constructed.  And when the pieces were all in the U.S., the plane was literally snapped into place - no rivets.  Amazing.  The final product is significantly lighter than conventional planes and therefore more fuel efficient.

There’s so much change taking place all around us.  Are you drinking it in?