Most simply, ‘present shock’ is the human response to living in a world that’s always on real time and simultaneous. You know, in some ways it’s the impact of living in a digital environment, and in other ways it’s just really what happens when you stop leaning so forward to the millennium and you finally …
Futurists take what we know now and project into the future ideas about things will be like years from today using the models that have worked consistently up to now. Those models applied to human systems are changing quickly making marketing the future based on them senseless and potentially dangerous. Earlier this past week a …
Complexity and the Senseless Marketing of the Future Read More »
Addressing the challenge of complexity is, ironically or perhaps appropriately, complex. But the challenge of dealing with the negative outcomes resulting from overly simple approaches to dealing with complexity will ultimately be far more so.
By paying attention — being mindful — of what you’re doing and how it is working, you can start to build a longer-term strategy or pattern of activity that moves you along to where you want to go. It also prevents you from the let down at having not achieved your goals, but setting yourself up for success rather than failure. These kinds of strategies address the complexity of human lives and provide a useful replacement for New Year’s Resolutions.
I look at the Law of Simplicity that suggests that more emotion is better (for simplicity) and argue that it might be so, but it also reduces clarity, which is what simplicity tries to imbue.
In John Maeda’s 5th Law of Simplicity, he states that simplicity and complexity need each other. While true, the challenge that more complexity adds is evident in that there is simply more complexity. Another look at the relationship between simplicity and complexity.
John Maeda’s 4th Law of Simplicity states: “knowledge makes everything simpler”. In this post I lay out why this might be only partly correct, suggest that there are problems where this works better than other and illustrate how knowledge can also make things more complex, rather than simple.
John Maeda has taken on the task of exploring simplicity as a means of making sense of a complex world. In this post I explore his 10 laws and introduce an argument that challenges three of these laws.
We often confuse simplicity and complexity, which can have harmful effects on our health and social wellbeing. The confusion between the complex and the simple as it relates to public health is discussed in this look at issues like vaccination and cigarette smoking.
