Originally published 9/20/2013 as “Apple, Elegant Design, and the Affordable Care Act”
There is an inspiring and exciting, at least to folks like me, Marco Della Cava article in the Sept 20-22 USA Today about Jony Ive, head of the hardware design group at Apple. I’m going to skip over all the nice things written about Ive and the reasons he is said to have had more power at Apple than anybody but Jobs and get right to one brilliant quote about design:
“I’ve said this before, but simplicity is, well, it goes back to…you’re trying to define the essence of something and come up with a solution that seems utterly inevitable and obvious. I think a lot of people see simplicity as the lack of clutter. And that’s not the case at all. True simplicity is, well, you just keep on going and going until you get to the point where you go, ‘Yeah, well, of course.’ Where there’s no rational alternative.”
And that, of course, is exactly the opposite of what happened with “design” of the Affordable Care Act.
Added 7/28/2018 – And with essentially ALL federal and state legislation.