On simplicity #4 • Reciprocal realization
Design is a process of reciprocal realization. If we want to arrive at something simple, we need to participate in this fundamental process of mutual adaptation.
So far I have addressed points 1, 3, and 4 of my original 10-point list in On simplicity. Today let’s revisit number 2, which I skipped.
What I wrote back then was:
Simplicity depends on both the objective structure of a thing and your subjective experience of it.
Making something easier to understand may involve changing it, but it may also involve changing yourself — by changing your perspective. How easy something is to understand depends on both it and you — how the thing is structured and how you make sense of its structure.
This breaks objectivity! But that doesn’t just make it subjective either. (Spoiler alert: it’s more like a transjective, co-identified relationship.)
A lot of this we already discussed:
#2 • Meaning-ful design suggests that we can change the structural-functional organization of a thing in such a way that it becomes easier for us to make sense of it.
#3 • Familiarity shows how much of simplicity relies on our own subjective experience: both in the sense of experiencing interaction with a thing, and also in what we have (implicitly) learned about it over time.
If we want to make something simpler,
we can attempt to change it, or
we can attempt to change ourselves.
Or we could do both. Potentially even at the same time.
Uh, wait a second… changing something, and changing ourselves… didn’t I talk about something like that before…?
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First let’s have a look at what we can change:
Changing it
Some of the ways in which we can change the structural-functional organization of it:
We can try to increase coherence by organizing complexity more intelligibly.
As Christopher Alexander points out, we should aim to remove everything unnecessary.1
And we can utilize concepts we are already intuitively familiar with, for example simulating natural real-world behavior in software.
Changing us
Some of the ways how we can become more familiar with it:
We could learn how to use it by reading an instruction manual or other people’s tutorials or similar things. And because we live in propositional tyranny, that’s kind of the expected, but often not exciting way to do it.
As we are interacting with it, we may reach a flow state and implicitly learn a lot about how it behaves and works that helps us making sense of it. Perhaps we will even have deeper insights discovering better ways of how to interact with it in the future.
And as we gain more experience and build intuition with it over time, we improve our skills (procedural knowing), become more aware of what it affords us to do, and in which situations that is appropriate (perspectival knowing), up to a point where we may even feel so familiar and comfortable with it that we feel a kind of belonging (participatory knowing).
Some things make it easy for us to adapt to them. They just make sense. They work “intuitively”. They might be fun. They may be good at capturing our attention — for better or for worse.
Others make it incredibly hard. We can’t understand what’s going on and we don’t really want to find out. It’s just annoying. Often we just have to push through, because we really need an outcome that only this thing can afford us, despite it working against our motivation.
There must be something about their structural-functional organization, about their design, that either supports or undermines our efforts to become more familiar with it.
Examples from the software industry
I’m sure you can imagine many products or appliances you used in your life that fit in either the former or latter category. Think about software. I’m inclined to say that almost all software belongs to the second category, but even I can admit that there are notable exceptions that belong in the first.
Professional software that has been around a long time has somehow successfully managed to evolve with their users in a symbiotic relationship. Applications like Photoshop or Illustrator come to mind, or digital audio workstations like Logic or Ableton Live.
What is curious about those kinds of applications is that they have quite a steep learning curve — they outright demand from their users to invest time and effort in becoming familiar with them. And they reward it with depth, flexibility, and multi-aptness: once you get familiar with it, it seems almost like you can do anything with it, and even expert users keep discovering new ways of achieving desired outcomes in better ways.
However, one class of “applications” that has turned making their users familiar with them into an art form are games. Games are highly optimized flow machines that take you from “I don’t know what’s going on” to mastery on a trajectory that is perfectly tuned to keep you in the optimal channel between anxiety and boredom. As your skills improve, the challenges get harder, just enough to keep you interested and engaged, but not too much so that you get overwhelmed and frustrated.
“Professional” applications like the ones mentioned above usually don’t guide you along your development and you have to find books, courses, or tutorials which fill this gap for you. They do offer a similar depth of exploration and skill building.
Compare that to single-purpose apps that have been designed for ease of use, but make you instantly bump into their limits as you understand how they function, and want to do things just a little bit differently — but you can’t. Or, the other extreme, where even courses and tutorials can’t help you make sense of their convoluted user interfaces and strictly enforced procedures that just don’t seem to align with your thinking at all.
Software that works best is not necessarily designed for ease of use (although that helps and is important to convince us to start the journey), but for a continuous disclosure of what we can do with it as we figure out how it works. It helps us discovering its affordances and therefore supports us in becoming familiar with it. It offers depth in the form of many affordances and different ways of achieving outcomes that align with our understanding and give us agency, long before we discover any limitations.
Reciprocal realization
This is very much like engaging in reciprocal realization. As we interact with it, make changes to it, we learn more about it, it changes us. We become more familiar with it, we grow and develop our skills and understanding, and we do that in a feedback loop of continuous interaction. We make (small) mistakes and discover what doesn’t work. Then we learn why it didn’t work and gain deeper understanding. And then we recover from our mistake and learn how to do it properly, increasing our agency.
What’s often missing in software is its “willingness” to grow with us: Unless we are in the process of designing it ourselves, software is not usually adapting to us as it gets to know us better. Some software provides crude approximations of adaptability through configuration, customization, or perhaps extension mechanisms. But these often work against simplicity, add to the perceived complexity, and can easily overwhelm us, especially if the configuration and customization options are not intelligible to us (yet).
Of course, more and more software turns to data collection and algorithms that learn about us and our preferred ways over time, but not necessarily to adapt to our preferences, and these algorithms are almost always opaque and therefore not intelligible at all. Even if they work well, they feel like magic and do not contribute to our understanding.
In fact, they are incomprehensible black boxes by design, and they often also change their behavior over time, preventing us from ever making sense of them. We may be able to accept such limitations in exchange for utility, but we will not feel comfortable. If we can’t ever make sense of it, it will always feel foreign; we will never feel like we belong.
Truly simple systems support us in learning about them with an intelligible structural-functional organization that we are able to make sense of. This does not mean that their structure is simple at all. It also does not mean that their capabilities must be extremely limited. It only means that we can connect to them in a way that enables us to effortlessly figure out what we can do with them and how, so we can adapt to them, become familiar with them. Ideally, at the same time they will also adapt to us. We grow together, mutually disclosing more about us to each other, getting more adapted to each other over time. Until our identities become so intertwined that you become a “Photoshop person” or an “Ableton Live person”.
The fundamental process
As designers of such systems it is our mission to keep this feedback loop alive and participate ourselves in it as we change the system we are designing in response to what we realize. Design is a complex dynamic process of mutual adaptation that optimizes for fittedness.
Design needs to be iterative. We need a feedback loop. We need opponent processing. We need phases of diversion, when we explore ideas, and then we need phases of conversion, when we select the most promising ones. We need to try these ideas, play with them, and be ok with some of them leading nowhere. We need to participate in this complex dynamic process of mutual adaptation, because we cannot just change it, we also need to change ourselves, we need to learn, to grow, and to come to insights during this process to get a chance at approaching optimal fittedness.
Simplicity shares a lot of similarities with beauty and fittedness.
“We know it when we see it” is a tell that our subconscious S1 processing is at work and that with enough exposure and experience our implicit learning machinery provides us with the intuition to spot what is simple.
There is no purely analytical way to fittedness. We cannot plan or test our way to good design. Design is not complicated but complex. We need both S1 and S2 processing working in concert. We need both analytical and creative thinking and the full range of our cognitive capacity. We can utilize flow and intuition to give our subconscious S1 processing the room to surface the insights we need for our S2 processing to do its best thinking. One step after another, iteration after iteration — probe, sense, respond.
Christopher Alexander, of course, is deeply familiar with this:
How different all this is from the anal-retentive up-tight worry about design, in which factors A, and B, and C, and D, and E, and F… all have to be manipulated together, before the designer and the planner and the client and the bureaucrats can be satisfied. We have seen some thing in the examples of this chapter which is far more robust. Each process does something — just one thing — which is important, practical, and creates good feeling. Then it does another. Then it does another. There is no manipulation and distortion of the structure, trying to predict where it is going, trying to make sure everything is OK. There is a sublime confidence, and practicality, and simplicity.
If we do one thing at a time, and if what we do is wholesome and sound, then whatever comes next will work. We do not have to tie it down ahead of time for fear of some imaginary potential catastrophe of “design”. Instead, we just go step by step, doing what is required as well as we are able, with confidence that the next thing, too, will work out somehow when its time comes, but that it need not be worked out now.
— Christopher Alexander, NoO.II.2.5, The underlying processes whose traces we have seen
Approaching design like this is tremendously difficult, because our culture strongly incentivizes mechanistic, predictable, reliable, results-oriented methods instead.
At the same time, approaching design like this is also incredibly easy, because it is in our human nature after all. We just have to remember it.
Mirror of the Self is a fortnightly newsletter series investigating the connection between creators and their creations, trying to understand the process of crafting beautiful objects, products, and art.
Using recent works of cognitive scientist John Vervaeke and design theorist Christopher Alexander, we embark on a journey to find out what enables us to create meaningful things that inspire awe and wonder in the people that know, use, and love them.
If you are new to this series, start here: 01 • A secular definition of sacredness.
Overview and synopsis of articles 01-13: Previously… — A Recap.
Overview and synopsis of articles 14-26: Previously… — recap #2.
Another great way to start is my recent presentation Finding Meaning in The Nature of Order.
We will come back to this when we discuss item #6 on my list.