In praise of simplicity
In today's entry on his gizmos blog, Ralph Grabowski writes compellingly about simplicity. It brought to mind a manifesto by Matthew E. May, Elegant Solutions: Breakthrough Thinking the Toyota Way, Here's what he has to say about simplicity:
Mention innovation, and people immediately think, technology. The truth is that business innovation is about value, not gadgetry. But the pace of technological progress sweeps us off our feet and we get all caught up in the gizmo, losing sight of the why behind the what. People don’t want products and services. They want solutions to problems. That’s value. And when it come to solutions, simple is better. Elegant is better still.
Great innovation requires understanding and appreciating the concept of elegance as it relates to solving important problems. Oliver Wendell Holmes once said: “I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.”
Elegance is the simplicity found on the far side of complexity. An elegant solution is one in which the optimal outcome is achieved with the minimal expenditure of effort and expense. Elegant solutions embrace an overarching philosophy of doing far more with much less, a notion that has become synonymous with Toyota and is present to this day in all of their operations, from design and engineering to manufacturing and distribution to sales and marketing.
An elegant solution is recognized by its juxtaposition of simplicity and power. The most challenging games have the fewest rules, as do the most dynamic organizations. The most memorable films have a simple message with complex meaning, touching a universal chord while allowing multiple interpretations.
An elegant solution is quite often a single tiny aha! idea that changes everything. Finally, elegant solutions aren’t obvious, except, of course, in retrospect.
"Elegance is the simplicity on the the far side of complexity." It's something that I've learned more and more over the years. Here's a good example: I've been working with Mike Riddle (one of the true legends of the CAD industry) to develop a new generation product. I'm not going to tell you what it does just yet, but here's a screen shot of its user interface:
No, this picture isn't missing anything. This is all the user interface the program requires. There is a right-button context menu that you can't see in this screen shot. And, if you wish, you can turn on a top menu bar. But you don't need to -- the program is designed to be fully functional without it.
Of course, this type of interface isn't anything new. Here's the interface we modeled it after:
Elegant, simple, and incredibly powerful.
Evan Yares
in Software Development, The CAD Industry
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10 Comments
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1 Reference
References (1)
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Source: The Future is Simple
Reader Comments (10)
can I, for instance, tear your "paper" into quadrants and tape each piece to other "sheets" (pasteup)? can I easily "hand" it off to someone else without using a printer dialog box? can I overlay it with "trace" and refine the contents? can I mark it up? can others mark it up without forcing me to save / print / email / .pdf it, each with their own subsprocesses.
can it be labeled for further reference by other "sheets". Is it self aware (a real improvement on paper that I can imagine)?
can the contents of your "paper" be drawing / text / a cell in a spreadsheet?
how would you design your Paper if the hardware it ran on was a 24x36 flexible pressure sensitive weatherproof FOLED display?
you can't get to the true power of a sheet of paper and pencil without re-defining most of what a computer is about.
CAD is not only about how lines get generated and displayed. Ultimately it results in a set of documents, the product of service. The workflow required to achieve and coordinate that set is the real issue of CAD. Time is money. Bad documents is lost money. turning design (thought) into documents is the whole process.
Revit is starting to get the document thing right, but doesn't understand the 2d part.
ACAD et al. does 2D OK (it's hard to imagine there isn't a better way to do "line,line.move,trim,cut,copy,rotate,move,line better), but nothing else. what a learning curve.
Sketchup does 3D design right but doesn't improve the workflow to documents at all. it still requires closing and opening other programs, dialog boxes, etc. etc. WE ARE NOT A CAD PROGRAM, what a missed opportunity.
Improve on paper, don't just mimic it.
if your pencil is a mouse, all bets are off. same if it's a stupid tablet pen.
if your paper results in a "file" that resides in a "folder" that one gets to with windows explorer, don't bother.
thanks, glad someone else is thinking about pencil/paper again.
ps. the whole computer "desktop" metaphor is a part of the problem, not because a desktop environment is a bad metaphor, but that the present software solution did a horrible job of mimicing an actual desktop. I think if you built a better desktop, you'd be closer to creating better paper.
jmw
ACAD et al. does 2D OK (it's hard to imagine there isn't a better way to do "line,line.move,trim,cut,copy,rotate,move,line better), but nothing else. what a learning curve.
But I ask...
Would it be an improvement if you were able to do most of the more common functions of 2D CAD without ever selecting a menu option (or 2... or 3), clicking a toolbar, typing a shortcut, or using the command line?
my thought is more that ACAD does acceptable 2d content creation - enhancing that part would be nice (should have happened by now at ADSK) - but alone this would not represent a substantial [read substantial enough] departure from the current offerings.
and surely, proposing 2D CAD tool enhancements in the context of real paper and pencil tool transparency, while imagining the mouse as the input device (i'm assuming, forgive me), is to miss something very basic about a pencil/human interaction. From my own experience and now watching my 2 yr. old daughter begin to draw with crayons, making a mark has a directness and predictability that a mouse (cursor and window) can never have.
Tablet pens help but the disconnect of hand pressure to lineweight, cursor / line processing delay are really significant barriers that I believe should be addressed with a different hardware model - probably one that better mimics a pen and paper.
My deeper concern is that the entire keyboard/screen/mouse/file/folder/harddrive system model is a huge stack of disabling layers that separate the creator from the idea.
What's a harddrive and why do I have to think about it?. As on my DESK, the things I create should be visible, tangible, they are to the right, left, 3 sheets down, 2 feet before on my trace roll, etc. And my mind seems naturally designed to organize them, remember them, and manipulate them in that real spatial framework.
Bill Buxton and Steve Jobs, and an article linked above? talk about devices that are more like tools than they are some box that does a lot of diffent things. Perhaps CAD needs to become more of a specialized appliance than something that runs within a computer.
And I believe the task is really just to create an excellent pen and paper "appliance". just that simple, The tablet PC has is slightly backwards. It's a box with an operating system first that limits direct interaction. It needs to be an input device first which can be turned into a drawing / spreadsheet / book tool.
Just like paper. Build this device well enough and it will become invisible for the user, like a camera, or a pencil, with which to capture thought, and later organize and create from it. It will become CAD, or you camera, or your canvas, or your presentation, or your soundsystem.
Time to leave behind the box.
Please don't author another CAD program for an outmoded hardware. Autocad already has that market.
Interestingly, WordPerfect seemed a little intimidating at first simply because there was no indication of what you were supposed to do to get started.
Word took over because it was "easier to learn", and it probably was/is a little simpler to use as long as you use it EXACTLY how some Microsoft programmer thought/thinks you should use it.
Over ten years on, however, and there are many things that WordPerfect for DOS did better than Word does now (illustrations and columns are two that come to mind) and in fact there are still many things it did that Word still can't do at all.
It don't do nuthin'.
I clicked on yer pitcher of the program an' it don't do nuthin'. I hit an 'f1' an all I get is 'Getting started with Internet Explorer'... Geez. Whur'z th' buttons on that thingamadoodle?
I clicked on the lil' X in the corner and it don't do nuthin', neither.
Witch butt on am which am i supposed to poosh? I want to be a bigtime DEEziner, and need to know which button!
I have a bootleg copy of some old rocket design software. Perhaps I should stick with that.
When will we get to see this thing in action? You are definitely building suspense.
Kevin