Otherwise the Mister Men books would be of more value than Gabriel

Otherwise the Mister Men books would be of more value than Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the time of Cholera or Shakespeare. I don’t think anyone would disagree with him about the need for many things in our lives to be simpler.But listen to this This is page 7 “Imagine the numbers going up in a staircase from 1-100. The first step is one unit high, the second step is two units high .. the hundredth step is one hundred units high. So if we added up all the steps we would be adding up all the numbers from one to one hundred. Now imagine a similar staircase placed upside-down over the first one.

There has to be an overlap of one at the end in order to fit a similar staircase. We now have a rectangle which is 100 units along one side and 101 units along the other side To get the total area we just multiply 100×101. That would give us “twice” the total we need because we have added up “two” staircases so we divide by two. The answer is 5,050.”This page demonstrates the Achilles’ heel of Ebono’s book. It’s his inability to grasp that mathematics makes me, and those like me, “lose it”. Page 7 is as far from simple human normality as I can imagine.

It evokes an old paradigm of teaching which inhibited learning and induced “school rage”.This is no way to bring people to value simplicity and act on it. Get real, Edward.There’s a “lecturey” tone to the book which I suspect works only if Ebono’s your cup of tea It doesn’t work for me I’m not “the reader” I don’t want “tasks” There’s hardly any wit or humour There’s an acknowledgement of the Art of Cartoonists. But the unyielding starkness of the book’s typographic rules excluded the use of cartoons can be a joy. For instance, the yellow of a daffodil or the power of a smile It can be exhilarating like lightening or a waterfall It can be inspiring. Think of human achievements like an igloo, a canoe or a paperclip. Complexity, too, can be enriching like Charley Parker’s music, the construction of a spider’s web or a blackbird’s song.I suspect that current mathematical theories of order and disorder effectively make complexity and simplicity false distinctions.

I think that what Ebono really wants us to do is evolve from our reliance on not thinking. In other words, drop bad habits.Michael WolffThe reviewer is a former President of the Chartered Society of Designers and the Design & Art Directors Association, and co-founded Wolff Olins in 1965. He is a founder and Head of Imagination of The Fourth Room, which helps companies see today what they can be tomorrow. ROGER MYERS: I met Hugh in 1993 while I was running the Pelican group, and he was involved with Pizza Express. We used to do the market research for Cafe Rouge by seeing if a site was near a Pizza Express. If you could get into that restaurant on a Saturday night, we’d decide it was no good And they would do the same. Usually when we opened near each other, we’d get a dip in sales, but generally one helped the other They were different enough and the market was big enough We were friendly rivals.