Form Minus Function

NOTE: I wrote this entry while in the NICU hospital room shortly after my second daughter’s birth. There’s a lot of down time with a baby that sleeps 20 hours a day…

The faucet in our hospital room in the NICU is aesthetically very pleasing. It is sleek and the absence of nobs, buttons or handles definitely adds to it’s minimalist form. It is essentially the simplest form of a faucet. I place my hands under it and water comes out, cold at first and then warm. I remove my hands and the water ceases to flow. Perfect right? Not exactly…

The faucet reminded me of a problem we so often run into as designers. We weigh the pros and cons of subtraction for the sake of simplicity and ease of use. In an attempt to avoid feature bloat, to convey intuitiveness, we are ever reducing. But there is a line. There is a line where the reduction of features begins to hinder the usefulness of a product and can ultimately cripple it. The lovely faucet in our room is the perfect example. When I want to wash my hands it works beautifully. But what happens when I need to refill my cup? Run cool water over a burn? Brush my teeth? And don’t even bother trying to do dishes. The faucet’s built in ‘intelligence’ and ‘ease-of-use’ has crippled it for all but the simplest of tasks.

John Maeda writes in “The Laws of Simplicity“:

“The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction. On the one hand, you want a product or service to be easy to use; on the other hand you want it to do everything that a person might want it to do.”

In the end I think the best solution is to design to the user and not the elegance of the tool. It’s good to reduce, just use thoughtful reduction and in the words of Maeda, “be careful what you remove”.