Hasta La Ideas

A photograph of Al Gore’s messy office opens Donald Norman’s new book Living with Complexity. At first this reviewer looked at the office and the piles of paper in judgment and then began to realize that the very man campaigning against messing up the environment had a rather messy desk. Donald Norman might differ. Living with Complexity takes the theses offered in his earlier books The Design of Everyday Things and Emotional Design and extrapolates them from the world of goods into the world of service providers.

In Norman’s view, Gore’s desk is the cluttered extension of an organized mind. Indeed, Norman interviewed many seemingly organized owners of messy workspaces and heard them repeatedly request, “Please don’t clean my desk.” The apparent disorder of the office was being carefully tracked in their minds. Norman explains that all of our desire for “simplicity” is a false hope because life is complex. Complexity, however, does not need to be confusing. Those designers who can manage to produce devices (and systems) that corral the complexity of the world into intuitively grouped and well-designed systems will garner success in our digital world.

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