The Laws of Simplicity

With so much information to digest and internet services to consume, comes a thirst for simplification. No wonder as I walked down the usual isle at the bookstore of new techie books I craved for that tiny and simple little book, redundantly called The Laws of Simplicity.
About John Maeda, he is a professor at MIT’s Media Lab and has explored both Computer Science and Artistic Design.
Off to the point, here are some of the rules Maeda brings up (I will gradually expand on all of them):

1. Reduce: Achieve simplicty through “thoughtful” reduction. There is a fine balance between how complex a system needs to be and how simple can we make it, so the idea is to remove functionality until we reach the complex barrier. A most interesting observation is that about “shrinking” objects. Maeda points out that we are much more forgiving about the functioning of a smaller object than we are of a bigger one, we are surprised when a small object displays a lot of functionalitis and feautures and praise it if so, however, if it doesnt then it is expected, after all it is a small object. Small and fragile technology is “cute”, which makes me think that really, we pet our gadgets like we would a living thing.
After extraneous functionality has been removed, but we are still left with some complex functionality, an alternative is to hide it, so that “complexity becomes a switch that the owner can turn on or off.”
2. The one: Simplicity is about substracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.
3. Context: What lies in the periphery of simplicity is not peripheral.
4. Differences: Simplicity and complexity need each other.
5. Organize: Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.