It’s all about the balance – right?
Aesthetics vs. function, durability vs. lightness, artistic vs. technical—it’s so easy to fall into a binary mindset. To some extent, my intuitive argument would be: ‘Yes, that indeed makes life easier—but in terms of?’ While we humans like clear frameworks and roadmaps to navigate through the complexities, it seems that at the end of the day, despite the urge to simply pick a side (or polarize, in a fancy way), things—in many cases—turned out the most favorable when we took a step down and found the middle ground.
In fact, it seems quite contradictory to me, especially considering Norman’s arguments as a whole: yes, we tend to be hard-headed and pick sides intuitively, and the ‘fact’ seems to praise the balanced, but to perceive that balanced beauty/harmony/coherence or whatever induced, it comes back to our first-hand perception system (or effects in Norman’s words).
Okay, I’ll try to step down from delving into the philosophical rabbit hole. However, maybe more practically, how can these inquiries benefit our—or my—practice? From poetry to music to tennis, I constantly struggle between the fine lines. And now, not surprisingly, but ‘coding’ turned out to be the same. If I am to name a takeaway from this, then although I may not be able to point out a solution to any of the fields at the point or even forever, it must be, again, transforming the mindset:
When we use the term balance, what’s its connotation? If something, two or more, needs to ‘be balanced,’ at least it sounds to me that we are assuming that those things are intrinsically conflicting to some extent. But what if they do not conflict with each other in the first place? I’m not saying that this is the new version of ‘fact’ but suggesting maybe we should try to get rid of that guggling mindset and try as hard as possible to really, really look at what we are dealing with as a whole.