Frankly, the reductionist view of design began with the dramatic Jobs vs. Ive framing and narrative around the Attack on Skeulandia: Steve Jobs, the liberal arts-y humanist, supposedly wanted the faux leather, felt, and wood-textured treatments of real-world objects applied to virtual ones. Jony Ive, the art-school modernist, supposedly didn’t want any of it.
Not only is this framing overly simplified, it’s also irrelevant to design discourse. It misses the key point that design is really about unlocking the possibilities that lie within multiple perspectives. That design is about solving a complex problem with multiple constraints. At their core, both Ive and Jobs understood this: Ive noted yesterday that design is “so much more than the way something looks,” and Jobs too has noted that design is about “how it works.”
Design, like many disciplines, is about a diversity of approaches as soft solutions rather than hard truths. It’s a spectrum, not an either-or decision about whether to skeu or not to skeu.
But our understanding of this spectrum is further complicated because both sides claim simplicity is on their side. The anti-Skeus say they are removing unwanted clutter (Ive himself noted that simplicity is about “much more than just the absence of clutter and ornamentation” and really about “bringing order to complexity”). Meanwhile, the pro-Skeus say they are restoring an emotional connection, and what could be more simple than that? (Jobs had always known this, so Apple strived for the emotional connection that good design can create.)
For my part, I have always believed that simplicity is about doing both: subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful. The question, of course, is what is meaningful? — and the answer indeed depends on the cultural context and constraints of the decision being made or product being rendered.
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