John Maeda

John Maeda(1996)

He pursuits a humanistic technology as an artist and a scientist. He explores how the technology and an art can be for a contemporary human’s life. One of his themes is simplicity. Nowadays, a machine, software or a technology is very complicate to use with one’s intuition. Before we use it, the preparation is needed, reading lots of manual pages and too many menus. As a technology improve, it is too complicated. Also he criticizes how people show off their amount knowledge and get artificial satisfaction in over-expressive way, gathering and adding tremendous research information. Even if a technology has been developed to get more, it is dysfunctional if human cannot use it easily. In this point, he asks what the improvement is. It cannot be said as a true improvement. People want to get more from technology and get an easy access to approach to technology. He redefines improvement as something between complexity and simplicity under the principle of “needing less and actually getting more”, suggesting the direction to the future technology”.1.

In his “The Law of Simplicity”,
Maeda's first law of simplicity is "Reduce." It's not necessarily beneficial to add technology features just because we can. And the features that we do have must be organized (Law 2) in a sensible hierarchy so users aren't distracted by features and functions they don't need. But simplicity is not less just for the sake of less. Skip ahead to Law 9: "Failure: Accept the fact that some things can never be made simple." Maeda's concise guide to simplicity in the digital age shows us how this idea can be a cornerstone of organizations and their products--how it can drive both business and technology. We can learn to simplify without sacrificing comfort and meaning, and we can achieve the balance described in Law 10. This law, which Maeda calls "The One," tells us: "Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful."2.

Then what’s the meaningful simplicity? I want to quote his comment about creativeness. His teacher, Ikko Tanaka told him that he has very creative, but there is two coin sides in creativeness. Good thing is a talent to think in various ways, but that ability interrupts you to complete. Even if you get an initial idea, another new ideas come over and over again. Finally the thought became more complex and remain as incompletion. However, Maeda asserts not to think any more, because you maybe already thought a lot and just do what you really want to do, depending on your intuition. This personal story is link to his perspective to think about technology. Human create computer and make it more complex by human’s creativeness. As Human expect computer to do more and more, a computer also became too complex for human to use. It makes us more confuse and drive us far from our fulfillments. In this case, human’s creativeness is incomplete because technology has been developed too much with absence of consciousness of a human’s simple goal.

John Maeda stress out a meaningful human’s life with technology. That is the technology can meaningful friend, not just a machine. To do so, human try to be an alchemist who have ability to extract something really meaningful.

1.http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10933
2.http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10933