Wabi-sabi is a Japanese aesthetic and philosophy of simplicity, humility and naturalness. In the era of information anxiety, this sort of approach is regaining popularity–”wabi-sabi” the new design trend now graces the covers of numerous books on home design, lifestyle, and pocket guides to zen.

As a designer of primarily digital information, I’ve been pondering how this aesthetic (of natural materials, impermanence, taking time to let things develop) might apply to the web medium. Obviously I cannot design a website with bamboo paper. Even if I were to scan images of natural materials, the website visitor is still confronting a computer screen between herself and that image–the very antithesis of naturalness.

Simplicity in design is not just about sparse, minimalist design. This approach can feel harsh and cold, knife-like. Simplicity should still have life:

Pare down to the essence, but don’t remove the poetry. Keep things clean and unencumbered, but don’t sterilize.

The culture of technology has its own momentum. New software products are released daily it seems, and trends are born and die off faster than bean sprouts. We are attached to the newest ideas, the latest techniques–and as a result we create things that cannot last. Simplicity is the latest keyword, but that doesn’t mean it comes from the perspective of the wabi-sabi philosophy:

Things wabi-sabi are unpretentious, unstudied and inevitable looking. They do not blare out “I am important” or demand to be the centre of attention. They are understated and unassuming, yet not without presence or quiet authority. Things wabi-sabi easily coexist with the rest of their environment.

How possible is this in the web design culture 0f awards, accolades, and IPOs?

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If you want to do one of the many other things Google is able to do, oops, first you have to figure out how to find it, then you have to figure out which of the many offerings to use, then you have to figure out how to use it. And because all those other things are not on the home page but, instead, are hidden away in various mysterious places, extra clicks and operations are required for even simple tasks – if you can remember how to get to them.

Norman even dares to suggest that – gasp – Yahoo! and MSN are actually easier to use, because all the user’s options are immediately available and the user doesn’t have to go poking around through the site looking for them.

Is Google simple? No. Google is deceptive. It hides all the complexity by simply showing one search box on the main page. The main difference, is that if you want to do anything else, the other search engines let you do it from their home pages, whereas Google makes you search through other, much more complex pages. Why aren’t many of these just linked together? Why isn’t Google a unified application? Why are there so many odd, apparently free-standing services?

Long live the iconoclasts! The “Google is so simple” meme is traveling the webdev world at lightning speed. It’s going to take some work to mount up a counter-meme (especially one that includes “MSN” and “good” in the same sentence).

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Robert Scoble’s microsoft blog offers an interesting theory about simple (or ugly) design — that an un-designed site is somehow more appealing and makes more money. Sites like MySpace, Google, CraigsList are notoriously simple in design and also incredibly popular. Perhaps there is something about slick, designer-ish websites that turns off the average user.

The comment trail on Scoble’s post is particularly interesting in its discussion of the differences between ugly, usable, simple, anti-corporate, etc.

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We’re a privately-held Chicago-based company committed to building the best web-based software products possible with the least number of features necessary. Our products do less than the competition — intentionally.

We believe software is too complex. Too many features, too many buttons, too much to learn. We build web-based products that do less, work smarter, feel better, and are easier to use.

The simplicity trend is everywhere. Less is more. But is it really that … well … simple?

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