I Struggle With Simplicity

I struggle with simplicity. On the one hand, I get it. Simple forms are more straightforward to get right than complex forms. Therefore, they're more successful more often. And therefore the maker gets more pleasure and happiness from simple work. The challenge of whittling down a form to its essentials is a genuinely worthy one and has endless solutions. I understand how someone can spend 20 years working on the same simple idea without ever getting bored or stuck. There's a lot of designing still to do inside the realm of the simple and quiet, and it's a comforting place to be.

But on the other hand, (and maybe this is because I'm so young) there's something inside of me that groans at the idea of making yet another rectangle. Even though I never groan at the real, beautiful, simple rectangles I see others making. Even though a lot of the things I make are in fact rectangles. Even though I use principles of simplicity all the time in order to make my complicated looking pieces work, still, I groan a little, at the idea of making a box that is nothing more than 4 walls, a top and bottom.

Because I don't just want to make boxes that hold things, quietly. I want to make boxes that sing while they do it, that cascade you with vibrancy and that have a presence of their own. I want to make objects that make people ponder how, in all the vast reaches of the universe, physics and chemistry and statistics combined, over and over and over to create all the right circumstances for this object to exist, for the materials to exist, for the maker to exist and for the thought and the motions to have entered and left her body together to create THIS. I want to create objects that sing I AM and WE ARE.

Have I ever done this? Sometimes, fleetingly, I will catch a hint of that divine melody from something I've made. But never has anything come close to embodying that spirit in the full sense that I crave. I don't even know if increasing complexity is the right direction to go. I'm sure to find more ridiculous failures than successes out here. And yet, here I am, running head first into the dark, hoping my leap of faith will pay off.

Here's the real reason I hate "simple" designs so much. Back, 5-ish years ago, I was in the Industrial Design (aka Product Design) program at BYU. In those classes, there was a culture of minimalism, and ornament was a bad word. Here I was hoping someone could give me design advice for concocting beautiful arabesque patternwork, for making objects look elegant and luxurious, or for utilizing traditional techniques in innovative ways. What I got was a bunch of chemical names for plastics, a disgust for consumerism and mass manufacturing and "Less Is More" shoved in my face any time I got anywhere near making something interesting. So I've taken it upon myself to be the champion of ornament, that divine aspect of design which is so often neglected and ignored; even shamed and ridiculed. Less is Less! Change my mind!