What is minimalism? Simplicity in form, with nothing to excess, right?

Let’s assert however that there can be two kinds of minimalism: structural, and affective.

Let’s also assert that this distinction reflects two primary concerns of design philosophy. The following quadrant of design choices represents the resulting output space.

The experiential axis signifies the canonical conflict between function and form: do you design for a purpose, or to direct the focus of the user? Do you make something useful, or something auteurially expressive, perhaps beautiful? Something self-expressive, or something evocative?

The subjective* axis signifies the other canonical conflict: do you design something complex but serving specific needs, or something simple and easy to use? Do you design for an individual user, or for mass accessibility? For someone, or for everyone?

Failing to distinguish the separate concerns represented by these two axes is what often clouds design decisions and our reactions to them. This dissonance can be seen in arguments everywhere, again and again and again. As with politics, the opposing sides argue past each other, each side eternally failing to understand the other’s values framework.

An exemplar of misunderstandingConsider the following example. When tech enthusiasts refer to Jony Ive’s minimalist design ethos as a token philosophy, they have often accused him of self-contradiction on occasions when they believe he compromised function on behalf of form. “Design is how it works,” after all. A maximally symmetrical keyboard innately compromises its numerous functions, despite Ive’s suggestions about minimalist form representing functionalism distilled.

But Ive is only truly minimalist regarding structural design considerations. He has always aimed for minimal structural complexity, not minimal affective form. Expanding on his preference for “simplicity,” Ive describes it as the end result of a process “to deeply understand the essence of a product to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.” From here I will refer to this sense of “simplicity” as minimalism, as it is more generally described.

The problem is that the vernacular use of “minimalism” happens to conflate experiential and subjective design. Ive’s experiential philosophy is really a centrist position, and not a minimalist one at all. In other words, generally people use the word “form” to mean both structural and affective form, without distinguishing the two meanings. Thus ensues all manner of confusion and false accusations of hypocrisy. Ive is not a design hypocrite, but he could use more distinct terminology to precisely express his philosophy.

When Ive refers to refining a product to its essence and thus effectively marrying form and function, he believes a truly minimalist design is the ideal middle ground between the two. But these concerns are only experiential; structural minimalism is unrelated to both! Ive is in no way opposed to functional design, even if many of his individual decisions and preferences were not to the end of pure function.

Essentially, Ive’s “simplicity” is represented by the vertical axis in the earlier quadrant. This design philosophy* is largely in opposition to individual expression and customization, to conceding design decisions to the user. It’s strongly focused on mass accessibility generally and, orthogonally, opposed to both superfluous and inelegant design. Ive’s products are for the every-person, not the individual. Setting aside manufacturing economics, EarPods come in exactly one size and shape. Idealized, this overall system would thus be represented in the top-middle of the quadrant.

You may wonder if there really are fundamental tradeoffs between these concerns. But even if you seek two different goals and believe you can fully satisfy both without conflict, the order of constraint prioritization still matters. Do you fix a chair to an ideal position, at the cost of making sitting on it more difficult? Or do you optimize ease of sitting on the chair, at the cost of making positioning it more difficult?

Other casesI use Ive’s taste only as a widely known example in the tech industry. Considerations like the number and kind of ports that are included with a computer meanwhile affect both experiential and subjective concerns. Reducing such decisions to simply a tradeoff between complexity and minimalism under-describes the design space! (Thinking through illustrative examples is left as an exercise to the reader, though I’ll suggest user interface animations as another excellent one to reason about.)

Similar confusion arises when discussing open source software. What does “open” mean? What does “free” mean? Hint: “free beer” is maximally accessible, while “free speech” is maximally self-expressive. This is the exact same distinction as positive vs. negative liberty in political philosophy.

Without expounding for thousands of more words, these values represent the extreme ends of the same pair of philosophical axes as described earlier, and their conflation results in all the same problems of misunderstanding value frameworks and false charges of hypocrisy.

Relation to art form, or art theory found usefulIn every artistic discipline there eventually emerges a school of thought that an artist should strive for harmony between its expressive form and the essence of its nature, that the medium should be the message. Artistic purity or honesty of form is sometimes sought by those who believe there’s inherent tension between the possible functions and forms of a specific medium.

Braid, as one example, is a game in which the literal mechanics of its puzzles convey the directed meaning of the game designer.

The goal of such efforts is to find the experiential middle ground between formalism and expressionism, between pure and program approaches. Charging a design with being “overly simplified” cannot be a experiential criticism.

Success at conveying meaning solely by the inherent elements of an art form is often obscured in the minds of the audience. That the central question these efforts seek to address is itself so unclear and variously interpreted reflects how widely confused experiential and subjective considerations really are.

But works can have objective goals, and designers can have clarity instead of confusion. In considering a design, as with all artistic works, you would always do well to distinguish these concerns.

• A design is “subjective” to the degree answered by the question, “What is asked of the user?”
  Ive only evolved towards his strict sense of “simplicity” over time. The original iMac was certainly not purely functional in its design.
  * Here’s a quote that neatly summarizes the entirety of this philosophy as in reference to Apple’s products: “‘The defining qualities are about use: ease and simplicity. Caring beyond the functional imperative, we also acknowledge that products have a significance way beyond traditional views of function.’”