”Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.” Terre des hommes (1939)
This quote is attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the great French author and aviator remembered for The Little Prince, Night Flight, and Wind, Sand, and Stars. The maxim was applied by Saint-Exupery to the design of aircraft, but like most commonplaces, has much to to say in other areas of life.
I have had two personal experiences that illustrate the wisdom of this in application to other areas.
My first experience in this notion of “perfection in design” came as a cast member for a production of a Bertolt Brecht play produced by a highly regarded American repertory theater in the 1970’s. The director was a rising star in the West End in London and well known for his Marxist-progressive sympathies. The costume designs were proto-Goth-punk and the staging was sort of a neo-Greek tragedy relying on the posing of stereotypes rather than the interactions of people. The leading actors were well regarded by the cast so nobody blamed them for what we had to offer unsuspecting audiences and they did their best. The supporting cast, however, were less than committed to the director’s vision.
The director flew back to London after a few performances and we underlings started taking our grumbling seriously enough that many actors just decided not to do certain bits of blocking or to strike some uber-meaningful poses. After all, the director did his work and then left us to have to perform the thing before audiences. The omissions and substitututions came on slyly, subtlety. Pieces of especially hated costumes were simply omitted, stage-pictures altered, entrances and exits modified. Those who were committed to this regimen said the changes they introduced were “improvements.” For help in understanding these petty, supercilious actions I refer you to Downwind of Upstage: The Art of Coarse Acting by Michael Green (not to be confused with An Actor Prepares by Constantin Stanislavsky).
The show was not particularly well-received, given that our audiences were known for their sophistication. There were other, more popular, shows currently running in the repertoire, which were selling out weeks in advance. For this show, the audience could come late and sit pretty much wherever they chose. As I remember, the running time was more than just a little longish so if one missed say, thirty minutes, here or there, you’d enjoy the play just as much. Soon, performances were being canceled of our Brecht epic and those dates were booked with other shows in the repertoire.
Predictably, the run of the show was soon announced to be closing early. We spear carriers rejoiced. I even think the leads were a little relieved.
One morning, about two weeks from the final performance, a notice appeared on the call board for the Brecht cast. The director was back in town and had seen the performance the night before. There was to be a special full cast rehearsal for the express purpose of “removing the improvements” that had made their way into the performance.
The second example came years later when I was director of development for a company that wrote custom Macintosh software for small businesses. I’m not sure how it is today but back then every software contracting company had it’s own libraries of code that could be adapted and deployed for almost every common data handling requirement, whether a studio scheduling application, a theater reservation and ticket printing application, or an inventory control system for rare and valuable antiques.
I remember for one job our designer and lead programmer were so far ahead on the delivery schedule that they began to think of “extra” features or graphical user interface bells and whistles that could be added. In programming this was often called “gold-plating” the code. The thinking by the nerdy programmers was always “wouldn’t it be cool if…” and we ultimately ran the risk of delivering the product late because of all the unrequested extras.
Having full confidence in my team and, based on the progress reports of the lead developer, I didn’t bother previewing it in advance. When we showed our handiwork to the client I was horrified by the gaudy, unnecessary, and impractical beast we were delivering. The customer kept looking from the screen to the requirements document but didn’t utter a sound until the demonstration was over. He calmly stood and said, “This isn’t what I paid for. Let me know when you’ve removed all the ‘improvements.’”
While not a perfect match for Saint-Exupery’s quote there is some notion of “perfection” in the design of airplanes, the direction of a play, and the usefulness of a piece of software. With aircraft there are physical measures of success that can be demonstrated by putting the airplane through its paces. With the Bertolt Brecht play, the director was hired to stage his vision and anything that approached that vision was relatively perfect. With a simple business software application anything that added mouse clicks or cluttered the screen with unnecessary gew-gaws not documented in the requirements had departed from perfect and was “gold-plated” crap.
I continue to find applications for Saint-Exupery’s maxim in real life and it helps fuel my intellectual drive to abandon all the cool ideas of the post-modern world and look for the underlying perfection that is now obscured.
What Then? 