Simplicity – an understanding of the complex

It can be difficult to find an appropriate balance between complexity and simplicity. We have so many, many choices when deciding how to live our lives. How do we determine what is important and what isn’t? Do we try to do and be everything, or do we set rigid limits on our activities?

The following statement by Tim Brown, author of Change by Design and CEO of Ideo, makes a lot of sense to me. He says that “minimalism has come to represent a style and as such is limited in its usefulness. It represents a reaction to complexity whereas simplicity relies on an understanding of the complex. This is an important difference. One is about the surface, about the stuff. The other is about our experience and requires a deep appreciation of how things work so as to make them just simple enough.”

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