Psychologically Minimal
I have probably found my own interpretation of minimal design.
In my life being an industrial designer, I was taught and trained to create beautiful products that achieve most of their values costing as little as possible.
In many situations, a minimal approach in product design could be very beneficial because it is sometimes easier to lower the cost, have a clean, sleek aesthetics, and convey its design language efficiently.
Above all of the benefits mentioned, I thought, there is a fundamental reason for being minimal, and that involves a lot of psychological factors.
Trust and Predictability
I used to hear about the essence of iPhone’s home button from Brian Merchant’s “The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone”, about how Steve Jobs wanted the iPhone to have a permanent “back” button while a designer in the team Imran Chaudhri was trying to persuade Jobs that it was all about generating trust and predictability: one button that does the same thing every time you press it.
“‘Again, that came down to a trust issue,’ Chaudhri says, ‘that people could trust the device to do what they wanted it to do. Part of the problem with other phones was the features were buried in menus, they were too complex.’ A back button could complicate matters too, he told Jobs.
’I won that argument,’ Chaudhri says.”
Finch (2021)
Vulnerability of Users
When I was watching Finch, a touching movie about an old man’s journey with his robot in the apocalypse, I started to analyze why could some simple movies be so moving. My temporary conclusion is that the audience think they have tasted or understood more than what the story and the acting convey. The minimal scenes are like keys that activate the richness of the audience’s life experience. Movies to the audiences are like products to the users. The goal is to design them to emotionally activate the audiences or the users.
My hypothesis is that the more the users think they understand about the details, the more fragile they could become, and the more fragile the users are, the easier it gets to emotionally activate them. But the designers need to be very careful not to make the product intentionally obvious, like the bad movies. The difficult part is to make it abstract and subtle enough while letting the users think they could taste, process, and understand all the details.
Overachieving Minimal
I was told by my previous boss about a story of Naoto Fukasawa:
“Naoto Fukasawa and his team was given about USD$475,000 worth of fee to design a water bottle. On the first presentation day, Fukasawa presented for 3 hours and at last he grabbed a marker and drew a rectangle with a line on the whiteboard, and that’s it.”
I don’t want to clarify the authenticity of this story, or to speculate the meaning behind Fukasawa’s sketch. I’m just throwing this story to you, and hoping that you could find something interesting or enlightening in it.