TED 2010: What the world needs now is Simplicity

The highlight for me at TED was the session on Simplicity.
TEDster Alan Siegal (founder and chairman of Siegal+Gale) gave a compelling talk on "America's crisis of complexity". The examples he gives in his talk demonstrates the power of simplicity and that even the most complicated forms can be made clear and simple.
(read his blog at http://www.siegelgale.com/author/alan-siegel/)

But why is such an obvious concept so hard to find and experience in the world?

Take for example the experience of a friend of mine who is getting ready to enroll his child in kindergarten. He is frustrated at the innumerable forms that he has to fill out and having to repeatedly enter the same information in several of the forms. He had to go submit the forms, and guess what? he had to fill out 2 additional forms to submit the application. All this to enroll his child in Kindergarten!!!
Why should the process of enrolling to kindergarten be so complicated?! Why are there so many forms to fill out? Why have the forms not been simplified to eliminate redundancy of information?
There must be a simpler way.
Its time to investigate. I wonder if I can apply "design thinking" to this process and develop a simpler form that is easy to fill out and at the same time captures all the information the school authorities need.
As a parent myself who will be filling out kindergarten applications in a year, I would like that; to have a simple form versus a package of information to enroll in kindergarten.

My first blog

My first blog!!!
I am at the airport waiting for the flight to Palm Springs, CA.
I'm spending the next 4 days at TEDActive 2010 and I'm going to be blogging about my experiences and insights from the event.