Complexity is a feature, not bug. Let’s treat it as such
Being a mere citizen today comes with more advantages than what a monarch could’ve dreamed of just 200 years ago! As a member of the middle class, I have access to a much better health care system, to a much larger body of knowledge — instantly, to more comfortable and way faster travel, … and to a decent toilet!
Needless to say, all of this is only possible today thanks to the ever faster technological advances we all love and cherish. Almost, if not all, of what we have today is the result of people thinking of, and creating, better ways to fulfill our needs.
Technology made us what we are today.
Over the years — and the centuries and the millennia — technology helped us reduce complexity and make hard and complex tasks easier to fulfill. Feats impossible to attain became achievable. Igniting fire? It’s a click of button away. Cramming thousands of small and delicate components into a small and portable device that can communicate, take photos and execute complex spoken commands? You can get one of those smartphones at 50 dollars a piece.
“Sure, medicine is way more complex today than what it was a hundred years ago. I mean brain surgery!” You’re right, but we made it possible only because we came up with tools, procedures and a lot of other stuff that took that complexity away and made the task at manageable.
As time goes by, and as the low hanging fruits were eaten already, it’s harder and harder to find problems to solve. The focus then shifted to optimizing the solutions we already got to make them easier, more reliable and, maybe, cheaper to use.
In our quest to do so, however, we only managed to render user-friendly solutions hostile, unmanageable. Look for instance to what we did to the tools we use to build the web; or to juice-making machinery.
As creators, we need to remember that what people want is less complexity, not more of it; they want to focus on the task at hand and make the most of it, not wasting time on how to use the tools. This of course does not apply to those who aim for mastery, be it for web developers, musicians or woodworkers, to cite a few.
Let’s aim for simplicity and gradual complexity.
