Do you remember when film photography was ubiquitous and consumer digital cameras were just starting to come onto the market? (Worryingly, there will be readers of this blog that won’t.)

At the time, there was any amount of commentary from the tech boosters who said that of course digital photography would supplant film soon enough. Meanwhile the naysayers trotted out a list of reasons why they wouldn’t be trading in their “real” cameras for these second-class substitutes and couldn’t see why anyone would.

I don’t need to tell you how that one worked out, but let’s look at the process by which this happened.

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Perhaps ironically, parsimonious design suffers from the lack of a clear definition. For some it’s practically synonymous with simplicity. For others it takes a narrower meaning that’s nearer to frugal.

Parisimonious design is when you’ve got enough, but no more. It prefers simple solutions to complex ones and conserves scarce resources wisely. We might think of these resources in economic or environmental terms and design products that are both cheap and don’t consume an excess of material or energy. We might consider the user and reject designs that squander their time, attention, energy and space.

Many bad designs offend against the principle of parsimony by being too big, too wasteful, too expensive, too complex, too high maintenance. Such designs are the metaphorical sledgehammer to crack a nut. We find ourselves thinking, “Do we really need all this just to do that?”

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