Tuesday July 7, 2009
Elegance as one way to describe "the quality without a name"?
We talk often about Christopher Alexander’s “quality without a name” that makes a design feel natural and right. Alexander describes it as:
There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in [all things]. … The search which we all make for this quality, in our loves, is the central search of any person, … . It is the search for those moments and situations when we are most alive.
While the quality can be elusive to create, an attribute that certainly leads to it is elegance. Guy Kawasaki interviewed Matthew E. May on elegance as a business concept in his book In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing . Simply stated, May describes elegance as:
Something is elegant if it is two things at once: unusually simple and surprisingly powerful. One without the other leaves you short of elegant. And sometimes the “unusual simplicity” isn’t about what’s there, it’s about what isn’t. At first glance, elegant things seem to be missing something.
The interview is well worth a read, and will be a new consideration for me as I work on interim and final deliverables. How can I find and apply “the quality without a name” on this piece? Perhaps by seeking elegance.
First found via Dynamic Diagrams: Information Design Watch
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Mark Kraemer
Mark is an Information Architect and Principal Consultant at EMC in Dallas. His professional life is a Venn diagram, where he lives in the intersection of the folks who wear suits and the designers who wear flip-flops. You can catch his other ramblings on user experience and design at his personal blog, Mark-up.