On simplicity #2 • Meaning-ful design

What can we do to make things so easy to understand that it just needs a “click” and then we “get” it?

Nov 10, 2023

In the opening post for this series about simplicity I wrote:

In the past, I wanted to make things simpler.
Today, I want to make things easier to understand.
“Simpler” isn’t all that helpful, because it’s like the word “better” — it’s not quite obvious what it actually means. And apparently it means different things to different people. “Easier to understand” captures my intention more crisply, when I want something to be “simpler”.

“Easier to understand” is somewhat more descriptive than “simpler”. But doesn’t it leave a lot of additional stuff out of the picture? Well, I’d say that depends on how you interpret “easy to understand” — in particular the word “understand”. There is already a lot of stuff in that picture to begin with…

If you’ve been following along for a while, you know that I’m not at all talking about analytical, intellectual understanding of how something works mechanically, such that you could explain it. I’m referring to a deeper kind of understanding — a procedural, perspectival, participatory understanding of having grasped the eidos, being in touch with the form or pattern or formula, having developed intuition for it.

If you haven’t been following along, there’s a lot unpack there (the links in the above paragraph will guide the way). But let me try to bring it all together in an example that should resonate with most software people.

What does deep understanding feel like?

At some point, probably very long ago, you didn’t know what Unix Pipes were. It’s probably difficult for you to remember what it was like back then, but perhaps you can remember the moment when you first learned about it — not just heard about it, but started playing with it until something “clicked”.

Suddenly, you “got” it. You saw the light. It became obvious. How powerful! How elegant! How beautiful! How simple! From that moment on, you had changed. You saw something you didn’t see before, and you can’t unsee it. Your salience landscape was reconfigured through transformational insight. You have grasped the eidos. You have developed intuition.

Now, this little concept of Unix Pipes just makes sense to you. On some weird, deep, fundamental level. So much so that you can “smell” it now when you program and something looks architecturally similar or you think should look architecturally similar. Of course, you do not literally “smell” it, but you grew this capability of sensing it in places where it suddenly just pops into your mind in the form of “Oh, hey, that’s just like Unix Pipes” or “Hmm… this would be better if it worked like Unix Pipes”. The deeper your intuition the more analogies you’ll see. That’s your subconscious S1 processing washing up implicitly learned patterns into your conscious S2 processing for your analytical consideration.

Notice how little this is connected to actually understanding how Unix Pipes are technically implemented. I’m sure you understand that now, too, or at least know enough so you could stumble your way through an explanation. Something, something, streams and filters, inter-process communication, etc.

But can you see how that is different from having this deep, intuitive, effortless understanding of what the concept is about? It’s distinct from this complicated, analytical, demanding bunch of thoughts you need to skillfully orchestrate in your analytical mind when you try to explain it.

I’m talking about the former kind of understanding.

And I am convinced that we can make things “easier to understand” in exactly that way, by designing them such that it’s easier to develop this deep, intuitive, effortless understanding of them. Such that they “click”, and then we “got” it.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that they also become easier to explain in the analytic sense. Sometimes, that’s possible. But more often than not it turns out to be quite a challenge to explain something that is simple and elegant.

So it’s important to separate between two kinds of understanding:

Being capable to explain a concept and
Having developed a deep intuition for a concept

We have been culturally accustomed through education and professional work to accept the purely propositional kind of understanding, which can be easily verified, as the important or even only relevant kind. But it is the deep intuitive understanding through transformative insight that is much more important and powerful (and is ultimately what the propositional frameworks we have institutionalized are still trying to aim for, but with questionable efficacy).

That’s the kind of understanding I want to design for.

But… how?

Meaning-ful design

The key to making things easier to understand is to design them with a structural-functional organization that is meaning-ful to us — to endow them with meaning. When we manage to do that, that’s when they begin to just make sense to us. That’s when we discover the design that afterwards becomes the obvious design, and we can’t believe how we ever did it any other way.

Ok, but how do we achieve that?
For that we need to understand better what meaning is.

We know from research that what contributes to meaning are three main components: coherence, purpose, and significance.

Another point in my opening post was:

Instead of thinking of things as intrinsically simple, I now think of them as being coherent so that they are more intelligible. That coherence comes from their structural-functional organization, but is only intelligible if it pairs up effectively with our way of experiencing it — we need to be able to make sense of it.

Naturally, we tend to immediately think of how the thing is made, how it works “under the hood”, and look for meaning there. And just like a painting is ultimately just a specific organization of color pigments on a canvas, that’s where it all must be, because that is the only structure there is, right?

But you don’t have to analyze the paint chemically or study the organization on a molecular level to feel a strong response to a great painting. You just have to look at it. In the same way you don’t need to study the source code for various Unix utilities or even the operating system itself, to feel a strong conviction that pipes are a powerful concept. You just have to use it. Somehow, once you understood it in the way I described above, it just makes sense. It is obvious. And hard to explain.

Somehow the structural-functional organization of the thing maps to something in our mind that resonates. We feel connected to it, and that connection feels like it making sense to us. That is what Plato meant by “eidos”: the form of the thing is the same form that is in our mind. We perceive it through its gestalt, not through its features. We sense the whole, without a need to identify parts. We don’t just know the thing, we somehow are the thing. We are connected.

Coherence helps with that conceptual mapping, but it is just one of the three dimensions of meaning. What about purpose and significance?

As embodied beings making sense of our environment mostly through metaphorical structuring, a huge part of how we understand our environment comes from how we interact with it. We can identify a chair from just looking at it, but we deeply know a chair because we know what it is like to sit on one. And we call some potentially weird looking object a chair, even though it doesn’t look at all like a prototypical chair, because what makes it a chair relies less on its form and more on its function. A simple tree stump in the woods can become a chair, just because it happens to be perfectly sized for us to sit down on it and take a break. It is fit for its purpose, even if that purpose was never initially intended. And if it is fit for purpose, it has meaning to us. And the more versatile something is, the more purposeful it becomes. Unix Pipes seem extremely fit for purpose, look at how versatile they are.

Lastly, significance. In what way are Unix Pipes significant? This reminds me of Christopher Alexander’s idea of strong centers. A center is a part of a whole that we recognize as a part of the whole in relationship to other centers. A strong center is an important part of the whole that strengthens other centers around it and increases the density of connections within the whole. It unifies the whole in the sense that it makes the whole more than just the sum of its parts.

Unix Pipes are a part of the whole that we call Unix. And it is a significant part, because would Unix be what it is without it? It’s a huge part of the identity of Unix. It strengthens other centers, like all the little utilities that you can compose together through pipes. It also plays a significant part in Unix’ principle of having small and simple tools that only do one thing but that one thing very well. I think it’s fair to say that Unix Pipes are quite significant, as well as fit for purpose, and intelligibly coherent. They are well designed.

Meaning-ful design is designing with coherence, purpose, and significance in mind. That, of course, is not easy to do. But when we manage to do it, we know that we created something beautiful, something elegant, something simple.

And while I don’t believe that there is a simple technique or formula that enables us to do this, I am convinced that we can become better at it.

Mirror of the Self

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