Does digital age overcomplicate design?

Alice Rawsthorn, design critic of the New York Times, argues that too many products use complexity to mask their flaws.

“Designing self-explanatory products is even more important — and more challenging — in the digital era, when devices like phones and computers are becoming ever smaller and more powerful as the public faces of unimaginably complex networks of cloud clusters, supercomputers, data centers and cell towers. Accident-prone though Apple has become, it has continued to design objects that look — and feel — uncomplicated, despite their extreme complexity. Nokia has done the same in the admirably lucid operating software of its cell phones. Yet too many companies continue to produce unjustifiably complicated designs with opaque instructions that render them more perplexing, rather than less so.”