Living with Complexity

Living with Complexity
Donald A. Norman. MIT Press, 2010. (280 pp., HC., US $24.95).

Condemned to complexity is how Donald Norman describes us in his latest book, Living with Complexity (MIT Press 2010, recently published in Italy by Pearson). Norman is an engineer, psychologist and former vice president of Apple (where, he explains, he tried in vain to convince the company to include a second button on their mouse, a change only made later). He is also the author of cult books such as The Psychology of Everyday Things (Basic Books, New York 1988), Things that Make Us Smart (Feltrinelli 1995), The Invisible Computer (Mit Press, London 1999) and the more recent Emotional Design (Basic Books, New York 2003). For some time now he has applied the principles of physical design to immaterial websites with Jakob Nielsen, a web-design guru with whom he heads the Nielsen Norman Group.

In his latest work, the author – known for having stigmatised certain bad design trends based on needless complication in the past—seems almost to changed his mind. This theorist of simplicity and a prime adversary of what he himself has renamed "featuritis" or the trend to keep adding more and more new functions to technological tools, explains that a certain amount of complexity is necessary. It is simply a question of deciding where to put it—in the object or in its use. Norman makes the example of skis: although it is very simple to understand what they do, it is very hard to use them properly. The reverse is true of photographic-editing software. It is difficult to grasp all the possible options and menus but once they have been learned, it is the program that does everything and the user requires no special skill.

Everything is explained by "Tesler's Law of Conservation of Complexity", invented by Larry Tesler, another former Apple vice president. By this principle, the overall complexity of a system remains the same so "if you make one part simple, the rest becomes more complex", and "making things easier for the user makes them harder for the designer or engineer." Certainly, explains Norman, you have to distinguish between complexity and complication: the first is in the facts, the second in badly designed products. "Why do we have so much trouble with machines?" asks the author, whose book is filled with advice on how to translate his theoretical principles into practice, because we impose "machine logic on people, human beings who do not work to the same rules of logic." The author is backed up in this by the whole history of man-computer interaction, the riveting and epic attempt to keep improving our dialogue with machines. Donald Norman has been one of its champions and in this book too plays a prominent role in the exploration of design that focuses on the user and not the technology.
Stefania Garassini