June 4, 2008, 1:16 pm
John Maeda in the Kitchen
by Lisa Agustin
Filed under: Books and Articles, Business
Designers and technologists aren’t the only ones taking an interest in Maeda’s Laws of Simplicity. Chef and author Mark “The Minimalist” Bittman recently blogged on how Maeda’s law of reduction (Law No. 1) is a good approach to cooking, too. Bittman is famous for keeping things simple (a prime example: “Summer Express: 101 Simple Meals Ready in 10 Minutes or Less”) and is always looking for ways to cut through the clutter of cooking:
I took recipes from whatever cookbook I was using (in those days, almost all were pretty complicated) and I stripped them bare. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t acknowledge that browning meat didn’t add color and flavor to a stew — it unquestionably does — it’s just that I also saw that there were times when I wanted to make a given stew recipe and didn’t have time for either browning or the extra cleanup resulting from it.
The idea of thoughtful reduction is an important one in the creation process, whether the end result is a new recipe or user interface: how do you make things simpler without removing what’s necessary?
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