Keeping it simple: Nick looks at the human tendency to complicate matters

2500 years ago, Confucius said: ‘Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.’ The philosophy of simplicity applies with equal measure to product design, manufacturing, management and systems. In fact almost anything you can think of works best when it’s kept simple. But even simple designs and structures get complicated over time. People add extra bits and pieces to cope with market demands and to do things the designers never dreamed of. Something that started out clean and well designed for a purpose, can soon become cluttered and clumsy.

Computers

Experts say we use only 5% of our computers’ capabilities. This is probably a wild overestimate. Take spreadsheets - they can do all sorts of clever and sophisticated things, and get more and more complex as more functions are added to please everybody. But most of us never use them.

Having all these extra functions doesn’t make it better for us – it makes life more complicated. Yet what we really want is to do a simple job quickly, cheaply and easily. An enormous amount of memory is used just to operate these complex systems and the operating system gets bloated and becomes more important than the operator.

We tend to accept it for the most part, whatever the inconvenience, because there may not be an alternative. But when the iMac burst onto the scene, PC users who switched got a shock. There was no set up, and little to go wrong. They just took the iMac out of its box, plugged it in, pressed the on button – and it worked.

Cars

Cars too have suffered from complexity. The newspapers have been full of it. Mercedes was once synonymous with quality and reliability. It was the best – German taxi drivers drove nothing else. But then Mercedes added a computer system, then another and another. Now there’s one to take the temperature, one to manage your telephone calls, another to pick up the traffic alerts, one for your sound system, and another for heating and climate control. There’s even one to help you park, and another to stop you from hitting the car in front. Then when you’re on the M25 at 7.30 in the morning the screen in front of you goes blank. You haven’t a clue how fast you’re going. The car goes back to the garage to have the computer system analysed and diagnosed – but unfortunately not fixed. It’s too complex.

J D Power, the international car ratings agency, report that Mercedes has plummeted from the top to near bottom for quality and reliability. German taxi drivers vote with their money and now choose older Mercedes or new Japanese models. Large numbers of its cars were recalled. It’s not the only upmarket carmaker to suffer, and the firm says the problem has been addressed in its new cars, but even Mercedes has been humbled by complexity.

Conservatories

When you’re on the M25 at 7.30 in the morning the screen in front of you goes blank

The same thing is happening in conservatories. Manufacturers boast of 6000 bits in their roof system – indeed some now have up to five systems where one used to do. Having so many products means mistakes are more likely. It’s a nightmare picking parts, with so many products and codes to choose from, there are more out-of-stocks and more mis-picks. Quality control for 6000 products is a headache, especially if they are outsourced.

Having made life more difficult for customers you then need to help them. They need a bigger technical manual and much more technical support to help customers find their way around the maze. The cost and pain of the suppliers’ lack of clarity and discipline is borne by customers who are required to adapt to the complexity foisted on them.

Good design should be simple, for customers rather than suppliers. The onus is on the designers to think through the challenges and difficulties and design out the complexities. Like iMac or the phenomenally successful iPod, you judge the product by what you don’t see. If something can be done in the factory, it should be. Whether it’s a DVD player, a PC, a car or conservatory we all want products which are plug and play. So we can get on with making sales and making profit.

A simple philosophy

Our approach to running Synseal is to keep things simple. It’s the basis of our product innovation. We listen to what our customers want and whether it’s SynerJy, Global or Shield we aim to make the design simple to make our products easier to fabricate, and easier and quicker to install. But keeping things simple isn’t easy. Over a period of time, systems, company organisation and products have a natural tendency to evolve and become more complicated. And complexity creeps in by different routes.

For example, although it’s over thirty years since metrification our housing stock hasn’t changed much. It’s still based on the old imperial system in feet and inches, and we tend to use 300mm, 600mm, 1200mm in place of 1ft, 2ft, and 4ft and so on. But they are not the same, and pretending that metric ‘equivalents’ fit neatly into imperial based buildings just makes life more complicated.

Design should be kept simple. It takes time and energy to make things simple. But we think it’s worth it, and our customers agree.