Under the tree

My wife just gave me a copy of John Maeda’s The Laws of Simplicity, a book I’ve been wanting to read for a while. Maeda, whom I heard once at an ACH-ALLC meeting in Georgia, ranks on my top-three list of really inspiring speakers along with John Seeley Brown, who once addressed a HICSS convention in Maui, and also Ben Shneiderman, who lit up the recent Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science with his talk on information visualization (a topic that usually makes me yawn).