When less is more

WHY is it so many manufacturers cannot leave well alone? They go to great pains to produce exquisite pieces of technology. Then too often, instead of merely honing the rough edges away to perfection, they spoil everything by adding unnecessary bells and whistles and unwarranted girth. In the pursuit of sales, they seem to feel they must continually add further features to keep jaded customers coming back for more. It is as if consumers can't be trusted to respect the product for what the designers originally intended.

Occasionally, they get it right. When the little Flip Mino camcorder came out a couple of years ago, your correspondent (not an instinctive early adopter) just knew it was something he had to have. What impressed him about the design was not simply the gadget's diminutive proportions and low price, but the way the developers had so ruthlessly resisted all the marketing pressure to add further features—and had single-mindedly maintained the design's clarity of purpose. The Flip had one function, and one only—to fit in a shirt-pocket ready to be flipped out in a trice for those fleeting video moments. This it did brilliantly. Though the Flip's performance has kept pace with technical improvements, subsequent versions have steadfastly maintained the designer's original concept.

AP

Van der Rohe contemplates simplicity

Such rigorous lack of feature-creep is rare. Look at what has happened to netbooks—those once-minimalist laptop computers for doing basic online chores while on the hoof. Though palmtop computers and sub-notebooks had been around for decades, a Taiwanese firm called Asus introduced the world to netbooks in 2007 with its ground-breaking Eee PC. The two-pound device had a seven-inch screen, no optical drive or hard drive, and occupied half the space of a typical notebook computer of the day. It had all the essentials (and no unnecessary extras) for doing the job, and could be slipped into a briefcase, handbag or raincoat pocket and hardly noticed.

Seeing a good thing, rival makers rushed in with me-too versions—each purporting to offer improvements. The original keyboard was only 85% as wide as a full-sized one. Many people thought that just fine, especially as it offered the luxury of a seven-inch screen. For the past 20 years, your itinerant correspondent has cheerfully used palmtops with 62% keyboards and six-inch screens to check his e-mail, surf the web and file stories from odd places. The me-toos, nevertheless, deemed 85% unusable and increased it to 92%.

With the increase in keyboard width came an increase in the netbook's screen size, room for a fairly hefty hard-drive, additional ports, a bigger battery—and yet more weight. Today's netbooks are now the size of low-end laptops, with up to 12-inch screens, 160 gigabyte drives, one or two gigabytes of random-access memory, a video camera, and cellular as well as wireless transceivers. As a result, they now weigh well over three pounds and need a padded case to lug them around. The original concept has been lost in a blizzard of feature-creep.

Much the same has happened to digital cameras and other electronic toys. Witness the way Canon, Nikon and others, not content with including audio recording in their digital cameras, have now added high-definition video and even built-in projectors as well. Neither are carmakers, despite their long tradition of chiselling away at product costs, immune from feature-creep. The latest version of Honda's clever little Fit (known in some places as Jazz) is 10% bulkier and beefier than its predecessor. Toyota's new Highlander is nearly 20% bigger than the right-sized version it replaced.

Because something can be done does not always mean it should be, though. Back in the 1980s, Richard Gabriel, an expert on Lisp programming, noted that quality in software development does not necessarily increase with functionality. “Worse is better” was the phrase he coined in a seminal essay on Lisp. There comes a point, he argued, where less functionality (“worse”) is a more desirable (“better”) optimisation of usefulness. In other words, a software program that is limited in scope but easy to use is generally better than one that is more comprehensive but harder to use.

Mr Gabriel's paradox was really an attack on “bloatware”—in particular, the kind of feature-creep that forced Apple to abandon its Copland operating system and buy NeXT for the Unix software that became Macintosh OS X. In the process, “worse is better” has become one of the pillars of efficient software design and much else. Regrettably, it is not practised as much as it should be. But when it is, the process embodies simplicity, correctness, consistency and completeness.

To Mr Gabriel, simplicity—in both the internal implementation and the external interface that greets the user—was the most crucial aspect of any design. Although the design should also be as technically correct as possible, if that made things more complicated then any compromise should favour simplicity. Likewise, consistency was important but could also be sacrificed for simplicity's sake. Finally, the design should cope with as many situations as practical, and certainly all those normally expected. But completeness should always be sacrificed if it jeopardised any of the design's other qualities.

This overarching idea of simplicity is what Mies van der Rohe, architect and leader of the Bauhaus movement in Germany during the 1920s, meant by his motto “less is more”. It's what now, with latter-day eloquence, is called “KISS” (short for “keep it simple, stupid”).

The idea has actually been around since the 14th century. It is the basis of Occam's razor as well as Einstein's maxim that “everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler”. It was the guiding principle of Colin Chapman, the legendary founder of Lotus Cars, who sought to make every component in his featherweight speedsters do the work of two. His dictum “add lightness” has informed every modification your correspondent has made to his superannuated Lotus 74 track car (see “Fly or drive”, March 21st, 2008).

As an aircraft enthusiast since boyhood, your correspondent has long had a special place in his pantheon of heroes for the poet-aviator Antoine de Saint Exupéry, who pondered the meaning of flight as he ferried mail through the North African night in the 1920s. “Perfection is achieved,” he mused, “not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” How much better the world might be if more of today's product designers could adhere to such a principle.