Just a reminder that there’s less than a week to go before the Design 2.0 conference in New York City. The event, arranged by design supersite Core77, has assembled an all-star panel of design thinkers to discuss the intersection of design, innovation and strategy. What exactly is Design 2.0? Well, strategic designer Emily Chang has a great blog post describing the key elements of the Design 2.0 philosophy, which can be summarized by words such as intuitive, social, minimal, transparent, useful and fun. Google, of course, is one company that knowingly or unknowingly has embraced many of these Design 2.0 ideas. After all, the company’s search products are intuitive, social, minimal, useful and fun.
That’s why it’s interesting to see that one of the panelists at the Design 2.0 event will be Marissa Mayer of Google, who leads the product management efforts on the company’s primary search products. According to Emily Chang, the Design 2.0 minimalism embraced by Google is part of a larger trend on the Internet:
“Perhaps it’s the success of Google’s search page, or our collective reaction against the flashing banner ads and intrusive popups of the last decade, or the Jonathan Ives effect, but it’s as though web users, designers, and developers alike have all agreed to a new de facto standard of Mies van der Rohe’s “less is more.”
In the arts, minimalism can be defined as “reducing the concept or idea to its simplest form.” Minimalism strips away our concerns for the superfluous and let’s us focus on what’s important. It also let’s us imagine the possibilities by giving us the environmental freedom to feel in control and comfortable – a psychological state that makes it easy to explore and to create. Minimalism in design allows patterns to emerge because people are comfortable with the experience…
Natural. Expressive. It sounds simple, almost elementary, but how do you achieve an experience that’s both intuitive and exploratory to your audience, particularly when all of us have such subjective and unique perspectives? First, by focusing on designing experiences and then, by providing areas for people to express themselves.”
