John Maeda Keeps It Simple

Seattlest was there because a friend of ours lists Maeda as one of his design heroes. After a long day we were hungry, tired, and really just wanted to be at home in preparation for the new episode of Heroes. After buying a muffin, we walked into the room where the talk was to be had and ended up in a sprawling conversation with Maeda about his Seattle roots, the elegance of fruit (the self-packaging banana was hailed as one of Nature's "best products"), and his recent moves up the M.I.T. Media Lab ladder. Maeda was obviously confident (and smart as all get-out), but didn't have the same arrogance that some design gurus display.

Maeda began his talk with a call to action of sorts. Rather than taking a position from a lofty pedastal, he posited that the eternal balance between simplicity and complexity is all around us, and went through some of his own pictures to illustrate this fact, implicitly challenging us to change our perspective. The pictures, from around the M.I.T. campus, from his vacation, from Maeda's children, were a bit like that plastic bag scene from American Beauty minus the pretension. It all felt as natural as the conversation we'd had in the back of the room, with Maeda trying to remove the mystery from simplicity. Maeda closed by going through the first four Laws of Simplicity as described by his book.

As expected, John Maeda's presentation was no more complex than it needed to be. A conversation would suffice, so a conversation is what occurred, thoroughly engaging Seattlest for the hour. We haven't yet read The Laws of Simplicity, but we plan to remedy that post-haste. We'd recommend you do the same.

Image from John Maeda himself (or rather, his flickr account - user name: maeda)