Is it possible to simplify life without losing the comfort and complexity that enriches it? 

John Maeda, vice president of artificial intelligence and design at Microsoft, has been writing about the intersection of design, technology, business, and life for years. His book, The Laws of Simplicity, explores the question of needing less while still getting something more. 

He and Greg discuss some of the pivotal moments in John’s career, how his view of design changed over the course of writing The Laws of Simplicity, and the aspects of business education that could use some tweaking. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

Traditional design is not the same as customer-centricity

26:42: Business is about design thinking. It's different. It's customer-centricity. It's all the C words, whatever. But the way design is taught, like your microphone, is so beautiful. It's super cool-looking, right? That was created not just to be easy to use. It was also created to be "beautiful, stand out, et cetera," whatever—all these other factors that are not user-centered. They're ego-centered, which you could argue is like user-centered design, but it's different…[27:32] Traditional design is good at messing with your mind, your ego, and your wallet or purse. And it's fascinating. But it's not the same as customer-centricity. And that's what's so interesting about it and useful about it at certain times in a product's evolution.

Understanding powerful concepts of computer science

23:27:  There are certain concepts in computer science that are hard to understand because they're so powerful. So, I focus on what's powerful. And what's powerful is that it never gets tired. That's weird. It can loot forever. It is able to encompass large data sets at any scale and at any level of precision. So, it can handle infinitely large issues with infinitesimal accuracy. That is strange. And so, going through these properties helped me understand how weird it is. 

Two kinds of supply chain risks

10:32:  There are two kinds of supply chain risk. There's physical supply chain risk and digital supply chain risk. And a physical supply chain – we know what that looks like in our heads, or optimized with Amazon robots, etc. But a digital supply chain is like building on top of Azure, and Azure goes down. Whoa, what do you do? Or you've built your organization's communication system on Slack, and it goes down. Like, what do you do? So that's an invisible supply chain that we're just starting to understand in business, and they're very similar. Unless you're cyber-equipped, it's just that you can't see the kind of analogy you could make between the two worlds.

On being equipped to explain computation

30:13: I realized how powerful computation is, and I realized that anyone can explain design better than me. What is something that I'm equipped to do? Oh, I can explain computation. So, I wanted to make a way to explain to any business leader what computation is. Because if they don't understand it, they can't digitally transform.

Show Links:

Recommended Resources:

• Who Moved My Cheese by Spencer Johnson
• Moore’s Law
• Donald Knuth
• Traitorous Eight

Guest Profile:

• Automattic Advisory Council Profile at MIT Media Lab
• Professional Website
• John Maeda on LinkedIn
• John Maeda on Twitter
• John Maeda on YouTube
• John Maeda on TEDTalk
•  John Madea on Talks at Google

His Work:

• The Laws of Simplicity
• How to Speak Machine: Computational Thinking for the Rest of Us
• Redesigning Leadership (Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life) 
• Creative Code: Aesthetics + Computation

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