[Sigia-l] Simplicity

[Adrian Howard]

On 12 Mar 2007, at 06:47, Ziya Oz wrote:

> Somebody emailed me about a quote:
>
> "Accept the fact that some things can never be made simple."
>
> which I believe is from John Maeda's book, "The Laws of Simplicity."
[snip]

Possibly. Rule 9 (of 10) from the book is "Some things can never be  
made simple".

> I haven't read it, so I couldn't comment on his take. But I spent  
> the entire
> weekend looking at a 200MB Visio file of a very un-simple business  
> process,
> which when plotted would cover an entire conference wall. My job is to
> drastically simplify it. I haven't personally seen many things that  
> are so
> inherently un-simple that they can never be made simple. Have you?
[snip]

Depends on what the thing needs to do, and how much people will allow  
you to change it :-)

However, like you, not many things that are inherently complex. Lots  
of things that people _want_ to be complex - but that's a separate  
issue.

Adrian