Month: December 2020

There was a period in the mid-20th century when the future of nuclear power was bright. Nuclear power plants were to fuel the next phase of economic growth. The best and brightest studied nuclear engineering and innovation accelerated. It was the Atomic Age.

And then, fear snuck in. Fear over bombs, fallout, and toxic waste. Warranted or not, it snuffed out the enthusiasm. Over the next few decades, new projects stopped being proposed and students moved on to other fields. Predictably, nuclear power hasn’t made much progress since the 80’s.

Project selection has a compounding effect. The more you work on something, the more insights related insights you can generate, and the more you can innovate. 

By giving up on nuclear, we stopped making progress in that domain. By outsourcing manufacturing, we’ve ceded the future of manufacturing tech to other countries. 

This applies at the personal level, too. I’ve spent 15 years digging deep into financial markets and software engineering. I probably won’t be discovering a new nuclear reactor design.

I wonder what kind of future we’ll be able to create when a growing percentage of people only learn about social and ethereal reality. Ignoring the physical is a luxury.

Simple. We know it when we see it. But how to create it? To me, it’s all about the experience of effortlessness.

Does the object get in my way? Do I have to guess about how to use it, or what it’s for, or what it means? Then it’s not simple.

An object may be beautiful, have few parts, and be completely symmetric.

A perfectly round chrome sphere satisfies these. But it’s not necessarily simple. What am I supposed to do with this thing?

On the other hand, consider a door with no handle. The door can be old, the paint can be peeling, and yet I don’t have to think. I naturally push on it and move on.

You’ve heard this before: design is about how it works, not just how it looks. If your design makes something more effortless to use, then it’s getting simpler. Otherwise, you may be complicating things.