Tara Hunt over at HorsePigCow has written a thought-provoking post on clutter and its role in our lives, contrasted with our desire for simplicity in other aspects of our lives.
There is a place for clutter. It is in the personal. We all know that life and people and feelings aren't simple. Nor can they be. Individuality is extremely messy.
I wonder if we crave simplicity in our machines, services, programs and services so that we can free up some more room in our personal lives to allow for culture to happen?
I love clutter ... when I was in university, my roommate *didn't* like clutter. Her side of the room had ONE perfectly framed poster. MY side had scads of pictures and posters; my bulletin board was an archeologist's dream (and an archivist's nightmare): quotes, reminders, scribbled entries on calendars, protest buttons, random bits of string, birthday cards, etc.
Aside from being a very messy filing system, my clutter created an opportunity for my very active right brain to create patterns that would keep my left brain quiet. It was a kind of physical hypertext .. relationships, constantly renewed, from one fragment to the next. I was always very disappointed that I couldn't take this physical manifestation with me from place to place. My bulletin board in my apartment was different than my bulletin board in my office which was different again from the sticky notes on the computer which different from the notes scribbled on the white board in the TA lounge.
Fortunately, digital technologies gotten me a lot closer to my single bulletin board dream. Konfabulator is the latest in desktop tools I've employed to try to replicate the physical bulletin board experience. Along with 3M's digital Post-It notes, these tools have allowed me to customize my desktop and keep the powerful non-linear relationships created by clutter.
Web 2.0 (side note .. I don't always love Jared Spool, but he has a great little article on Web 2.0 that really sums up it's power and impact quite well) is also supporting the portability of clutter. My Backpackit account has become a repository for notes, collections, ideas and other detritus. deli.cio.us keeps track of my link clutter. Better yet .. some of these tools introduce a third dimension into my clutter -- shared clutter. I can use social networks, tagging and folksonomies to build relationships between my own and like-minded persons' clutter.
These digital advancements offer the best of both worlds -- Tara touches on this dichotomy in her post: sleek simple interfaces (deli.cio.us' bookmark is a snap to use) that free up our creativity to allow more clutter that subsequently feeds our creativity.