The Nature of Technology

Good design in fact is like good poetry. Not in any sense of sublimity, but in the sheer rightness of choice from the many possible for each part. Each part must fit tightly, must work accurately, must conform to the interaction of the rest. The beauty in good design is that of appropriateness, of least effort for what is achieved. It derives from a feeling that all that is in place is properly in place, that not a piece can be rearranged, that nothing is to excess. Beauty in technology does not quite require originality. In technology both form and phrases are heavily borrowed from other utterances, so in this sense we could say that, ironically, design works by combining and manipulating clichés. Still, a beautiful design always contains some unexpected combination that shocks us with its appropriateness.

At the creative heart of invention lies appropriation, some sort of mental borrowing that comes in the form of a half-conscious suggestion.

The insight comes as a removal of blockage, often stumbled upon, either as an overall principle with a workable combination of subprinciples, or as a subprinciple that clears the way for the main principle to be used. It comes as a moment of connection, always a connection, because it connects a problem with a principle that can handle it. Strangely, for people who report such breakthroughs, the insight arrives whole, as if the subconscious had already put the parts together. And it arrives with a ‘knowing’ that the solution is right – a feeling of its appropriateness, its elegance, its extraordinary simplicity. The insight comes to an individual person, not to a team, for it wells always from an individual subconscious. And it arrives not in the midst of activities or in frenzied thought, but in moments of stillness.