My visual system was overpowered by this bus stop sign in Taiwan during a recent trip. It seems to use every kind of typeface, every possible color, and every possible means to express a great deal of information. In a drab urban landscape, it appeared like a gorgeous flower sprouting from the concrete sidewalks. Although I luckily did not have to try to decipher the sign as I was traveling by foot, I certainly appreciated the emotion-al dimension that it contributed.
Thinking about Google reminded me of when I visited their HQ a few months back. I was greeted with the magic NDA machine that seemed friendly and all, until I tried to sign my name digitally. The computer pen’s response was terribly off and translated any legible scribble of mine into a vaguely correlated scrawl. I wondered about the legalities of a digital signature when the result bears no resemblance to the original input. Complex.
As I logged into Gmail today and saw the latest Gproduct release, my mind bumped a bit against the marketing phrase of, “Simplicity Squared.” If simplicity is something truly reductive, were you to mathematically raise it to the second power and square it I wondered if you’d end up where you really want to go.
Consider how when you square a number like 5 you get 25 (bigger), or if you square 3 you get 9 (bigger). But once you hit the number 1 = “true simplicity” and you square 1 you get 1 (the same). Go below 1 like 0.75 and square 0.75 to get 0.5625 (smaller), or square 0.2 and you get 0.04 (smaller). Ah, so the square of simplicity is truly more simple. The universe is well and I can now go back to preparing for my London exhibition.
While I was traveling in Taiwan about a month ago, I saw that the mailboxes have two slots. One is labeled in English as “Prompt Delivery.” I thought it amusing that the assumption would be that the other slot would by nature be “Not Prompt.” If the faster slot were labeled “Express,” for some reason I would find the experience more forgiving. The subtlety of how we label time-based experience is amusing.
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