Designing for human limitations: a scientific perspective on minimal design.

Quick, try to recall the last five seconds that just passed as accurately as you can. What’s that, you can’t? Well, that means that you are just like the rest of us: blissfully unaware of our limitations. Try and think of 12 items of any description, write them down so you can check them out later, and then stop thinking about them. Do whatever you want: hang the laundry, do the dishes, you could even clean up your room for once, but let time fly over you (but not by much) and then come back, sit down, take a deep breath and try to recall the 12 items that you wrote.

If you remembered more than half (give or take two), then you have a way above average short term memory ( The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two, George A. Miller, 1956 ). Truth be told, the limits of our consciousness are there for all to see, hidden in plain sight, we just need to pay attention to actually notice them.

How can we, then, function in a society that demands so much from us? A society that demands attention spans longer than 12 seconds, multi tasking skills on par with an octopus on Ritalin, and the amazing ability to sit on a chair (for those lucky few) doing God knows what four hours at a time? The answer is simple: we don’t need to. Our brain in its infinite wisdom decided to carry that load for us, it decided to let us handle only what we could instead of what we should, running on autopilot most of the time, leaving the low level tasks to automated scripts and the rest, a hyper condensed blurb version of reality, to us.

How can we design for such a brain? How can we attempt to see that which is never shown, how can we crack the black box without crashing the plane? The answer is simple as well: we don’t need to. We design, instead, for the painfully limited, but infinitely more understandable, conscious self so that we can reach behind it. We turn those human limitations into design limitations, giving birth to minimal design, which instinctively strives to appeal to our conscious (and unconscious) instincts and perceptive models by removing anything that needs some form of high level cognitive functions, leaving only immediate, straight, instinctive, and direct comprehension because, truth be told, our eyes want it simple and clean.

Ever since it was discovered in 2004 , graphene has been hailed as a natural wonder of the materials world destined to transform our lives in the 21st century.

Graphene's amazing properties excite and confound in equal measure. How can something one million times thinner than a human hair be 300 times stronger than steel and 1,000 times more conductive than silicon?