When I started to blog about the topic of design in the early 2000s, it was a time when there were still DVD players and the iPhone hadn’t emerged yet. The cloud was just starting to cover the horizon of the sky-of-user-experience, and technology was just starting to make us happier and yet unhappier too. There needed to be a way to connect how technologists make products with the way pre-technologies were crafted by design—and thus the Laws of Simplicity (LoS) were born.
Luckily, I learned at an early enough age that I really don’t have all the answers. So I have been actively looking these past few years for ways to think of design in the future by searching out the rising lights. A chance search hit on the Internet led me to the work of Kat Holmes on “inclusive design.” This was back when she was at Microsoft—and frankly back then, Microsoft wasn’t the first name you’d think of when you wanted to imagine the future of design. But, I thought, “This is it!”
Because, spending time in Silicon Valley and working across hundreds of technology startups as a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, I intuitively felt that Kat had the solution to something truly important. Inclusive design was what was missing in the tech products being shipped to millions—ultimately leading to a fundamental mismatch between what people needed and what the techies in Silicon Valley were shipping out to them. I firmly believe that Kat holds the key to addressing the unfortunate set of common biases in how we make products in tech: for “ourselves” as a representative sample of the people in the world. So I reached out to her with a cold email and have been grateful ever since that she returned that first email message.
Kat Holmes brings us the right message about design, at just the right time. Her message isn’t one of simplicity at all—she forces us to think about the complexity. According to how Kat sees the world, there can be no simplicity unless we understand the complexities of how and why products get built today. As you may recall, the 5th Law of Simplicity says:
Designing for simplicity tomorrow will be impossible unless we make the effort to understand the underlying complexities of how we design today. If we don’t, we’ll only create more mismatches. We’ll create experiences that are simple for people like ourselves, only.
We need to ask the difficult question of who gets to make the products that we use today—because it ties directly into what gets made. This is the central question that Kat helps us wade into, with tact, theory, and concrete actionable advice for how to navigate this new way to design that is essential for any product maker out there.
As Kat says, “For better or worse, the people who design the touchpoints of society determine who can participate and who’s left out. Often unwittingly.” And, “If design is the source of mismatches and exclusion, can it also be the remedy? Yes. But it takes work.”
Good luck in doing that work. I’m doing that work right now too.
John Maeda
Lexington, Massachusetts
March 2018