Shelf Life

While reading John Maeda’s book, the Laws of Simplicity, the last section about how our "oh so" simple lives can be cluttered with the complexities technology has ingrained within them inspired an interesting question I would like to pose onto people.

If you could reduce your life and all that has shaped and defined it to a single shelf next to your bed, what would be on that shelf?

This could be pictures, a trophy, your sketchbook, a favorite novel, your fathers tie, a CD, or to kill two birds with one stone and conserve space you could have an iPod with all your music and pictures on it. When we strip everything down and sift through it all it’s fascinating to see what we essentially are and need. Lets look at the laws of Difference, we need complexity to understand simplicity. We tend to get distracted and overwhelmed with how complex we perceive our lives to be, but in the end and at its core we see just how simple we really are.