Linda Tischler's "The Beauty of Simplicity", from the November 2005 issue of Fast Company has a few nice stories and thoughts about technology and the battle between complexity and usability:

Here is how (Marissa) Mayer (Google's director of consumer Web products) thinks about the tension between complexity of function and simplicity of design: "Google has the functionality of a really complicated Swiss Army knife, but the home page is our way of approaching it closed. It's simple, it's elegant, you can slip it in your pocket, but it's got the great doodad when you need it. A lot of our competitors are like a Swiss Army knife open--and that can be intimidating and occasionally harmful."

And a great observation attributed to MIT's John Maeda:

On one level, he says, the problem is simply one of scale. Before computer technology, small things were simple; big things were more likely complex. But the microchip changed that. Now small things can be complex, too. But small objects have less room for instruction--so we get cell phones with tip calculators buried deep in submenus and user manuals the size of the Oxford English Dictionary to help us figure it all out.

Think of all the complexity in a airplane cockpit squeezed into your phone, and perhaps we have an image for all the power and features and complexity that could be brought to bear on the modern mobile. And with apps like Mologogo we've struggled with coming up with a feature rich, yet simple interface -- no small feat. Trying to develop along the paradigm of the modern desktop (the Windows/Mac UI + mouse + menus) for the phone seems like a foolish pursuit, no matter how well you do it will always feel small, cramped and crippled.

This may be an effective thought excerise regarding application features and any resulting UI: think about how you would build the same features in the era of tubes and hardware -- just how much of a monolith would it be? Replace each UI button with a real button, each mouse click with a toggle switch. How much heat would it generate, how much solder would you need, how many steel panels, how many sides? And how imposing would it be to use? Those dinosaurs, like the glorious old RCA Mark II that was housed up at Prentis Hall at the Columbia/Princeton electronic music center, are amazingly quaint to see today. Like some kind of Totoro-like benevolent form of monstrous wildlife.

Perhaps people don't typically treat a phone as something that we interact with so much as simply talk to. We're not looking for a conversation or interaction with a phone, or installed phone applications -- and what I mean by that isn't that the phone shouldn't or doesn't enable us to communicate: we're most apt to use the phone to "transport" us to another place to be (in conversation) with another human being. I could care less that it's a phone or a block of wood or a silver amulet.

Ubiquitous computing doesn't arrive until the computer -- or perhaps an object imbued with the sense of "technology" as the new and not-yet-commonplace -- disapears from view.

Thanks to Kottke for the link, and digging out the money quote.