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 in Milan I had the fortune of staying at an exquisite hotel that presented myself with a great deal of choices in how I might enjoy a coffee or tea in the privacy of my own room. Of the various implements available, I chose among the teaspoons this pared-down object that sits in the foreground. If I were more cultured, I would know its name. I’m sure someone out there can help me out with this, but its name matters little right now for me to continue.

When mixing a big sugar cube into a hot coffee, the teaspoon isn’t the best device to coerce the cube into melting. Do you scoop the cube in the curve of the spoon, then drop it back into the coffee? And just continue to do so? Seems a bit tacky to me.

Thus I enjoyed the “un-spoon” made available to me here, as it had real heft. The process of piercing the sugar cube was quite simple. Furthermore when swirling the coffee, the side blades did a great job at quickly rendering the sugar into the liquid. I wondered to myself, “Is this a teaspoon?” No. It seems specifically designed to attack the sugar cube. I felt it was something like a reduce-ed teaspoon, if such an object could exist.

Then again, I may have made a mistake and this little “sugar axe” as I call it was perhaps supposed to be used to turn on my TV instead, and really didn’t belong in the coffee server. I am known to have made such mistakes in the past. In this case, maybe it was not an error. Oh, what is this thing called?

Hong Kong-based architect Gary Chang showed this grainy picture of a “cageman” house. The structure is a low-cost unit that measures 1-meter by 2-meters where each unit is stacked vertically in a warehouse-like enclosure. There is no privacy as part of the living style of the cagemen, and naturally their belongings are pared down to only the barest of essentials a la reduce. Gary says that the inhabitants prefer living in the cages over regular living units because the spaces have the value of constant social interaction–surprisingly the cost difference to rent a cage versus a small flat is not significant.

Gary scored a bit hit with the design of his suitcase house built near the Great Wall. This building is a single story structure where when you walk in, all you see is a simple floor stretched across the entire building with no walls. The trick is that the floors fold and flip to reveal a kitchen, bath, bedroom and other components in the spirit of hide as developed in the first Law.

Describing his own tiny flat, Gary showed how he creates space on-demand by reconfiguring the elements based upon the time of day. For instance, he has a huge bed, that folds up to make space for his dining area with a kitchen that swings out, and then when finished eating he pops open his work space and then by the evening his projection TV screen unfurls with all other elements stowed away to create a personal theater. At the end of the day, everything vanishes and his bed folds out to continue the active cycling of his immediate living realm. It all looked quite simple to the audience, but by virtue of Gary’s subtle mastery of the art of context.