Barry Schwartz on ITConversations
Just thought I'd point you towards Barry Schwartz's "Less is More" presentation as given at Pop!Tech 2004, made available by ITConversations.

I just got finished listening to the podcast and found the presentation delightful (sadly, I did not find a link to the document he presented; much of the presentation references it, but mostly to the amusement of the audience). Basically he describes how having more choice leads to lower overall satisfaction.

Interestingly, in line with my earlier entry in response to Scott Fletcher's podcast, the issues raised by Schwartz I think are very solvable by technology, which gives me great optimism that we will be able to offer a wide variety of anything you can name, but largely mitigate the downside of potentially having to make all of these decisions.

Hopefully I'll get a chance in the next day or so to write up more detailed comments on where I think Schwartz is exactly right with some of my own thinking and observations that support his thinking, where I think more study is probably warranted, and how technology might begin to solve the issues raised by Schwartz to make having a large amount of options not quite so punishing to choose between. (Of course, if history serves, by virtue of having said that I hope to post more details later, I have now guaranteed that it won't happen. ;)

- posted @ 7:53 AM