Simplicity is hot right now, made fashionable by RISD president John Maeda and companies like Apple and Google. But there are some things to be said about it.

First, simplicity and minimalism are not equivalent, though they’re often conflated. Minimalism is a child of simplicity, but simplicity has other children too, the most versatile being organic or natural simplicity. Nature is more complex than anything humans could imagine, but nature is precisely as complex as it needs to be and not one bit more, which makes it simple. As Einstein said, “Make things as simple as can be—but not simpler.”

I admire minimalism as an art movement. Donald Judd, its founder, is one of my favorite artists, and Marfa, Texas, the town he shaped in his image, is one of my favorite towns. But minimalism can be a dangerous dogma in the context of world building. Unchallenged, it can lead to the same aesthetic solutions for very different problems and situations, producing a boring, soulless landscape.

In architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright’s natural, site-specific approach battled against the booming voice of International Modernism, which worshiped geometry and universal proportions, spitting out generic glass boxes for every project, regardless of the setting. This strict adherence to minimalism has left us with the drab corporate landscapes of many modern cities. On the Internet, this adherence to minimalism has left us with the drab homogenous landscape of the social web, in which the major sites all look and act more or less the same, encouraging and producing the same types of behavior.

In architecture, the basic trait is matter and the basic need is shelter. Online, the basic trait is interaction and the basic need is connection. The homogeneity of modern architecture has to do with aesthetics. The homogeneity of the web has to do with behavior.

When building tools (like Google or Wikipedia), minimalism makes a lot of sense. But when building worlds to house our digital selves, minimalism quickly crushes our individuality and leads to the kind of blah undifferentiated landscapes of shopping malls, corporate office parks, and many of today’s social networks. When building worlds, minimalism for its own sake should usually be avoided.

Finally, there is a difference between simplicity based on familiarity and simplicity based on universal truths. The lemming-like aesthetic conformity of today’s digital world has more to do with the former. True simplicity comes not from imitation, but from understanding. Certain situations will suggest a minimalist approach, but others won’t. Our digital worlds should feel like they sustain life—not just geometry.