paradox: people value complex design, rather than simple designs

I'm currently writing up my MBA dissertation and I'm searching for a NAME that describes the paradox that:

• achieving a simple, elegant design is very hard work but
• since the design is so simple and elegant it looks like it should be easy.
• so you get less credit than if you design something that looks complicated.

Don Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things, discusses this concept in Chapter 17 of Turn Signals are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles and even has a section titled "If It's Easy to Understand, Then It Can't Be Very Profound", but he hasn't named the concept, which is what I'm looking for.

Some of the consequences of this paradox:

• If you design something that's simple and elegant then your boss will ask you why it took so long or someone will say it's just plain common sense and they knew it all along (see the comment to this earlier post, for example).
• If you work long hours, or appear stressed, then people will think you're a better worker. (e.g. my boss recently told me that (a) he was thrilled with the quality and output of my work package and that it was largely down to my work, but (b) he was extremely disappointed that I'd only worked 6 hours overtime in the last year, unlike the troopers on the other (struggling) work packages who were coming in at the weekends).
• If you write a long document that's complicated and full of hard words then people will often rate the work as better than an simpler, easier version.

I posted this question on the information design guru Edward Tufte's FANTASTIC website and got a few interesting answers, but none were quite right - although "hindsight bias" is getting close.

My friends on the APICS Constraint Management SIG email list had a few more examples: 

• Jeff "SKI" Kinsey gave a classic example: 'i think mark twain and malcolm forbes said, "that if i had more time, i would have written a shorter letter." meaning that it takes time to refine and make it more concise and readable.' (NOTE: ski, doesn't use capitals)
• Tony Rizzo gave another  'It seems that you're looking for the antithesis of the Rube Goldberg.  I had a friend in Bell Labs, who faced a similar situation at every salary review process. My friend was an expert in surface-mount solder reliability, and he did his job. But at every salary review process somebody would always point out that the organization didn't really need my friend, because they never had any solder problems with their products.' [BTW: Rube Goldberg drew a series of cartoons that showed extremely clever and complicated "inventions" for doing simple, everyday tasks].
• and Grant Lindsay pointed out that "Nobody misses the water until the well runs dry..."

 

Can anyone help?

Comments

[Schalk Dormehl]

Sounds like somthing Douglas Adams would've enjoyed.

What we need here, is something simple, yet profound :) ...

-Schalk

[Tom Hopper]

As Antoine de Saint-Exupery said, "perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to remove."

I don't know of any term for this, either.

[leMel]

I’ve thought about this question a lot, actually. Being a graphic designer, I deal with this effect all the time. In the sciences, elegant simple solutions are revered – it seems that in the practical arts things are quite the opposite.

It also sounds a bit related to what I call the "why are you still here?" phenomenon. After working anywhere as a designer for a good length of time, your credibility can *only* decrease. The reasoning goes, if you are really so good, "why are you still working here?" It’s inescapable - time to move on.

I’d never considered this in terms of hindsight bias (as suggested above). Thanks for the new point of view!

Another interesting word that seems conceptually related is 'masking.' From what I understand, this applies to our perception of things outside ourselves by way of a constant internal self-image. Scott McCloud talks about this in his book “Understanding Comics” (on the E.T. reading list): A simply-drawn face compels us to place ourselves in the frame of action. In fact, the simpler the representation, the more profound the effect.

Add to this, it seems many comprehension processes might work this way. For example, comprehending speech entails activity in parts of the brain used only for speaking. So we understand what someone is saying partly via repetition in our own internal voice.

Thus, perhaps we experience a simple, elegant solution as obvious because of how easily and quickly it can be grasped. We therefore conclude that it is our idea. And if it is both our idea *and* your idea, then it must be obvious.

“Comprehensive internalization?”

[David Givoni]

Very interesting paradox, unfortunately I don't have a concept to describe it.
But having been through the process of creating a documentary a couple of times apart from my software development job, I think it's actually easier to see the validity of "the simpler, the better" when looking at the film creation process.
Because this is exactly what's going on first in writing up the script, but especially when going through the editing process. There is always pr. definition more footage than what will be used in the end product, and the editing consists not only of putting pieces together, but also of cutting away all the non-essential parts. "Kill your darlings" is a concept I learned from that process, and I find that it's an extremely difficult task, but also very creative, and it mainly consists of creating shorter and shorter versions of the film.
But contrary to what you describe, in the film world I actually think that simplicity is acknowledged as being a hard ideal to achieve.

[Peter Boothe]

You might look to the techniques employed by civil engineers and the like in an effort to gain appreciation - their job is remarkably similar, in that when things go right nobody notices, and when things go wrong they get blamed.

As to exactly what to do about this, nobody knows. It runs rampant in all creative fields, and is a large part of why everyone feels underappreciated. Coding, engineering, design, fine arts, acting, ...

I think the best thing to do is to have save version 0.1 to publicly compare your results with.

[steve schroeder]

Anyone can design something complicated, but it takes a genius to design something simple.

Author unknown.