June 2, 2009, 3:30 pm
Some Ideas about Elegance
by Henry Woodbury
Filed under: Books and Articles, Business
Guy Kawasaki interviews Matthew E. May on the concept of elegance. May, author of In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing, speaks of elegance as a business concept, rather than specifically as a design concept.
May’s essential insight is that elegance is only achieved when a thing is powerful as well as simple. I’m not enamored with a lot of his examples (Sodoku, charging hippos), as he seems to dwell on the simple. The following example is more provocative:
Chess masters understand the nature of complexity—that it is part of the game, and it’s why they play it. The challenge and thrill lies in the endless search for ways to manage and exploit those complexities. Make it SEEM blazingly simple. That’s elegance. Complexity isn’t the enemy to a chessmaster—without it they’d be playing checkers.
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