John Maeda is an American executive, designer, technologist. His work explores the area where business, design, and technology merge to make space for the “humanist technologist.”. Also, he is famous for his book “The Laws of Simplicity”. In this book he presents 10 laws he has created for simplifying both your life, and the things you may work on or design.
The 2nd Law of Simplicity he explains in this book is;
“ORGANIZE” – Organization makes a system of many appear fewer
To achieve this, he introduces an ad-hoc process which is called “SLIP”- which means SORT, LABEL, INTEGRATE, PRIORITIZE.
Sort: Write down on small post-it notes each datum to be slipped. Move them around on a flat surface to find the natural groupings.
Label: Each group deserves a relevant name. If a name cannot be decided upon, an arbitrary code can be assigned such as a letter, number, or color.
Integrate: Whenever possible, integrate groups that appear significantly like each other.
Prioritize: Finally collect the highest priority items into a single set to ensure that they receive the most attention.
This is a process that we can easily use to organize any design we work on. It’s pretty simple to understand and apply.
If this explanation stirs your interest in finding about the rest of “The Laws of Simplicity”, you can start reading the book or to get a briefing on these you can refer to the links below as well.
https://www.grahammann.net/book-notes/the-laws-of-simplicity-john-maeda
https://medium.com/@yingyingzux/the-laws-of-simplicity-john-maeda-fff929abda59