I am the first to admit that I am not the kind of person you would typically describe as a minimalist. I simply love well-designed products. However, I am an avid advocate for leaving things out in design. I love white space. A very talented designer friend once told me that the art of great design is taking things away, not adding them. And I remembered this life lesson when I read about Seoul, a city that solved a major problem by removing one of its biggest roads. So it made me think about an interesting design question:
How do you improve a system by taking something away instead of adding to it? And where else in our own lives could that same thinking help, when our instinct is almost always to add?
Let me tell you about Seoul first and then show you what this can mean for you. In the heart of Seoul there used to be an elevated motorway carrying enormous volumes of traffic. By the early 2000s it was ageing, and in 2003 the city chose to tear it down rather than repair it. Underneath ran a stream, the Cheonggyecheon, buried decades earlier to make room for the road. Seoul uncovered it, cleaned it, and built walking paths along its banks. Almost everyone predicted gridlock, on the obvious logic that the cars had to go somewhere.
The gridlock did not come. A large share of the traffic simply did not reappear elsewhere, as people adjusted their routes, departure times and modes, and within a few years speeds on nearby roads had returned to where they were before. Meanwhile the restored stream cooled its own surroundings. Air quality improved, and the stream became one of the most visited public spaces in the city.
The principle is induced demand, in reverse.
Just as building new roads tends to generate new traffic to fill them, removing capacity tends to make some traffic disappear rather than relocate, because the supply was creating the demand. This reaches far beyond roads. The extra meeting slot fills with meetings, the bigger inbox fills with mail, the new report generates new reporting.
And this is Behavioural Design at its core. We did not talk anyone out of their car or their meeting. We changed what the situation offered, and the behaviour followed the new shape. The demand was never fixed in people. It was held in place by the supply we kept giving it.
So how do you design by subtraction? Here are three practical moves:
Run the Seoul test on your busiest load. Take the thing you are working hardest to serve and ask whether the need existed before you built the capacity for it, or whether the capacity created the need. That question alone reframes a lot.
Try removing, not reforming. Before you optimise the recurring meeting or the report, cancel it for a month and watch what actually happens. Often the predicted gridlock never comes, because the demand was never as fixed as it looked.
Stop adding by reflex. The next time the instinct is to solve a problem with one more tool, slot or process, ask whether subtracting something would do more. Less capacity sometimes means less load, not less done.
Even the non-minimalist in me gets it now: sometimes the smartest move is to tear something down. My wardrobe, however, remains a work in progress. Awareness is step one, I'm told.
0,5 Minute on, Influence
The labour illusion: why effort you can see feels more valuable
Have you ever finished a task really quick but waited to send it over to someone because you thought that they might conclude that you did not really put the work in it? Even if you know it contains all the expertise someone needs? Well, you are not on your own. You are confronted with something called the labour illusion, studied by Ryan Buell and Michael Norton:
We value an outcome more when we can see the work behind it. Effort made visible reads as care and competence.
The honest use of this is not to fake work, it is to stop hiding the real work you already do. If you solved something for a client in ten minutes because you are good at it, the silent speed can read as carelessness rather than skill. Show the steps you took, the things you checked, the options you ruled out. The work was real either way. Letting people see it is the difference between feeling served and feeling brushed off.
See you next week!
Astrid Groenewegen
Co-Founder of SUE | Behavioural Design Academy, Author of 'The Art of Designing Behaviour' / 'De Kunst van Gedrag Ontwerpen' and ‘De Gelukscode’.
Source:
Seoul Metropolitan Government, Cheonggyecheon restoration project (2003 to 2005). Underlying science on induced demand and its reverse (traffic evaporation).