The more I thought about this weeks challenge the more I thought, “how am I going to fill this weeks brief?” I’m not paparazzi. I don’t do many photos of people and those that I do are nothing fantastic. I have a vast library of photographs I have taken, all catalogued and tagged but could I find one where someone was kissing or about to kiss….no. Nor could I find any animals kissing as Sara suggested.

I do have a few photographs from a friend’s wedding, but as I said I’m no paparazzi, therefore, I wouldn’t consider using them to publish publicly on to the internet.

That left me with a bit of a dilemma as to whether or not to take part in this weeks challenge. I tossed around a few ideas, none of them coming to fruition. Then this morning whilst walking the dogs on the beach it came to me in a flash of inspiration.

KISS – “Keep It Simple Stupid”

This week there will be no kisses from me, instead I’m going to show you some simple photographs, straight out of the camera, with just a crop and a slight touch of sharpening.

Allegedly, KISS is an acronym for “Keep it simple, stupid” as a design principle noted by the U.S. Navy in 1960. The KISS principle states that most systems work best if they are kept simple rather than made complex; therefore simplicity should be a key goal in design and unnecessary complexity should be avoided.

The acronym was reportedly coined by Kelly Johnson, lead engineer at the Lockheed Skunk Works (creators of the Lockheed U-2 and SR-71 Blackbird spy planes, among many others).

While popular usage has translated it for decades as, ‘Keep it simple, stupid’, Johnson translated it as, ‘Keep it simple stupid’, and this reading is still used by many authors. There was no implicit meaning that an engineer was stupid; just the opposite.

The principle is best exemplified by the story of Johnson handing a team of design engineers a handful of tools, with the challenge that the jet aircraft they were designing must be repairable by an average mechanic in the field under combat conditions with only these tools. Hence, the ‘stupid’ refers to the relationship between the way things break and the sophistication available to fix them.

The principle most likely finds its origins in similar concepts, such as Occam’s razor, Leonardo da Vinci‘s “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”, Mies Van Der Rohe‘s “Less is more”, or Antoine de Saint Exupéry‘s “It seems that perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”. Colin Chapman, the founder of Lotus Cars, urged his designers to “Simplify, and add lightness”. Rube Goldberg’s machines, intentionally overly complex solutions to simple tasks or problems, are humorous examples of “non-KISS” solutions.

There you have it for this week and so I will leave you with this quote from Murphy’s Third Law….