It was a typical cold, snowy New England winter day on December 17, 2004, when I started a WordPress “web log” on the topic of simplicity. There was a whimsical motivation to turning my research at MIT in that direction—namely, how the letters MIT occurred in perfect sequence in the words SIMPLICITY and COMPLEXITY. But there was a less Dr. Seussian motivation at play as well, which I wrote about in my first blog entry:
I have always been interested in how the computer (which is an object of great complexity) and design (which is traditionally about simplicity) tend to mix poorly together like the proverbial “oil and water.”
Subsequently, that blog turned into a book titled The Laws of Simplicity, which was rapidly translated into fourteen languages. Why was it unusually impactful? I think because it arrived at a time when computing technology was just starting to impact everyday lives back in the pre-iPhone era. That book’s overwhelming momentum and the concurrent rise of Apple’s successful fusing of design and technology oddly drove me to head in the opposite direction of computing’s inherent complexities and instead toward designing for simplicity.
I wanted to somehow get closer to the essence of design and move away from computers the way I had done once prior in my early career—back in the nineties, when I was a practicing graphic designer in Japan with a mismatched MIT pedigree. I’d somehow managed to escape the “T” (Technology) of MIT as an engineering student, and then made a U-turn into the thick of it as an MIT Media Lab professor leading the intersection of design and advanced computing technologies. Perhaps it was dealing with the weight of earning tenure that made me feel stuck somewhere in the future of design. I wanted to reconnect with the classics. I think it was a mix of not knowing what to do with the MBA I’d earned as a part-time hobby and an overwhelming mood in 2008 of Barack Obama’s “Yes, we can,” combined with my desire to rekindle the past, that resulted in my becoming the sixteenth president of the esteemed “temple” of the art and design world: Rhode Island School of Design, or RISD.
A series of later milestones, which built upon the work I had long led at the MIT Media Lab, gave me a reputation as a fierce defender of design. These included, for instance, appearing before Congress to encourage putting an “A,” for Art, in STEM education, turning it into STEAM, and later launching the “Design in Tech Reports” while working in Silicon Valley at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. So in 2019, when a popular business magazine announced in a headline that I’d said, “In reality, design is not that important,” it did not come as a surprise to me that I would be dragged through the internet mud by all lovers of design.
There were many short- and long-form responses to the interview that cast my responses as every shade of clueless and ignorant. I knew that the controversy had hit a peak when my idol, Hartmut Esslinger, the design force behind Apple’s original design language, started coming after me on social media. If I had earned some sort of “badge” in the design world, the internet was now ruling that it was my public duty to turn that badge in, and for a period of time I would be unwelcome at any Temple of Design out there. How did I feel? Terrible.
My words had been taken out of context from a twenty-minute phone interview—and, frankly, when the article came out, I immediately admired the editorial team’s choice of headline as brilliant clickbait. Apparently, my interview was the highest-performing article on their website for quite some time, as evidenced by the myriad spears and cleavers that were continuously being lobbed in my direction. What stung the most was knowing that few people had really read the entire interview, so the headline was all that stuck in anyone’s mind. To them, I had completely demeaned the work designers do every day. So I needed to be punished.
Here’s the reality: I honestly don’t believe that design is the most important matter today. Instead, I believe we should focus first on understanding computation. Because when we combine design with computation, a kind of magic results; when we combine business with computation, great financial opportunities can emerge. What is computation? That’s the question I would get asked anytime I stepped off the MIT campus when I was in my twenties and thirties, and then whenever I left any technology company I worked with in my forties and fifties.
Computation is an invisible, alien universe that is infinitely large and infinitesimally detailed. It’s a kind of raw material that doesn’t obey the laws of physics, and it’s what powers the internet at a level that far transcends the power of electricity. It’s a ubiquitous medium that experienced software developers and the tech industry control to a degree that threatens the sovereignty of existing nation-states. Computation is not something you can fully grasp after training in a “learn to code” boot camp, where the mechanics of programming can be easily learned. It’s more like a foreign country with its own culture, its own set of problems, and its own language—but where knowing the language is not enough, let alone if you have only a minimal understanding of it.
There’s been a conscious push in all countries to promote a greater understanding of how computers and the internet work. However, by the time a technology-centered educational program is launched, it is already outdated. That’s because the pace of progress in computing hasn’t moved at the speed of humans—it’s been moving at the exponential speed of the internet’s evolution. Back in 1999, when a BBC interviewer made a dismissive comment about the internet, the late musician David Bowie presciently offered an alternate interpretation: “It’s an alien life form . . . and it’s just landed here.” Since the landing of this alien life form, the world has not been the same—and design as it has conventionally been defined by the Temple of Design no longer feels to me like the foundational language of the products and services worlds. Instead, it’s ruled by new laws that are governed by the rising Temple of Tech in a way that intrinsically excludes folks who are less technically literate.
A new form of design has emerged: computational design. This kind of design has less to do with the paper, cotton, ink, or steel that we use in everything we physically craft in the real world, and instead has more to do with the bytes, pixels, voice, and AI that we use in everything we virtually craft in the digital world powered by new computing technologies. It’s the text bubble that pops up on your screen with a message from your loved one, or the perfect photo you shot in the cold rain with your hands trembling and yet which came out perfectly, or the friendly “Here you go, John” that you hear when you ask your smart stereo to play your favorite Bowie tunes. These new kinds of interactions with our increasingly intelligent devices and surroundings require a fundamental understanding of how computing works to maximize what we can make.
So I came to wonder if I could find a way for more nontechie people to start building a basic understanding of computation. And then, with that basic conceptual grounding, to show how computation is transforming the design of products and services. For much of the twentieth century, computation by itself was useful only to the military to calculate missile trajectories. But in the twenty-first century, it is design that has made computation relevant to business and, more so, to our everyday lives. Design matters a lot when it is leveraged with a deep understanding of computation and the unique set of possibilities it brings. But achieving an intuitive understanding of an invisible alien universe doesn’t come so easily.
This book is the result of a six-year journey I have traveled away from “pure” design and into the heart of what is impacting design the most: computation. I will take you on a tour through the minds and cultures of computing machines from how they once existed in a simpler form to how they’ve evolved into the much more complex forms we know today. Keep in mind that this book is not designed to turn you into a computer science genius—I’ve vastly simplified, and in some cases oversimplified, technical concepts in a way that will surely raise some experts’ eyebrows and might cause them to cringe. But I hope that, armed with even my rough approximations, you will learn how computation has expanded both in technical capability and in sociocultural impact—something you may regard simultaneously as hugely impressive and terribly frightening.
Computation brings its share of problems, but most of them have to do with us—how we use it—rather than by the underlying technology itself. We’ve entered an era in which the computing machines we use today are powered not just by electricity and mathematics, but by our every action and with insights gained in real time as we use them. In the future we’ll have only ourselves to blame for how computation evolves, but we’re more likely to succumb to a victim mentality if we remain ignorant as to what is really going on. So it will become only natural to want to pin the blame on a handful of tech company leaders, if not all of them—a fairly likely scenario, since fear of the invisible or unknown is far more powerful than any fear that has physical form, like a pack of wild wolves or a threatening tornado. The intangible, invisible alien force that is the internet represents the perfect object of fear that already lives in your neighborhood and teaches your children while secretly seeking to do you all harm, which explains why the eeriness of tech is so widely portrayed in TV and movies today.
I have always believed that being curious is better than being afraid—for when we are curious we get inventive, whereas when we are afraid we get destructive. Something about my experience between the Temple of Design and the Temple of Tech has kept me curious all these years. When I think more deeply about it, it’s the many career failures I’ve fortunately experienced in between my few successes that drive me to still remain a little hungry and foolish. But to be honest, I’m just like anyone else—tired, a little lazy, and all too eager to wait for a hero to rise who will protect me and fight for all of us. There’s a common lack of understanding of what computation fundamentally can and cannot do. Rather than give away your power of understanding to someone else, I invite you to be curious about the computational universe.
Perhaps I wrote this book for you. Perhaps you are the hero the world has been waiting for. Perhaps you are one of the many who will find a way to wield the power of computation with inventiveness and wonder. Those kinds of heroes are now desperately needed in order to advance computation beyond what it is today in its superpowerful, albeit running with the conflicted conscience of a teenager, form. Being new to the computational universe, you just might discover something that we first-generation techies have not yet been able to imagine. When you find it and make it into a success, it will set an example for the rest of us. I wish that heroic moment upon you someday, but first let me start you on the path to speaking the language of the machine.