Many years ago I attended a presentation by Dave Meyers on network complexity—which set off an entire line of thinking about how we build networks that are just too complex. While it might be interesting to dive into our motivations for building networks that are just too complex, I starting thinking about how to classify and understand the complexity I was seeing in all the networks I touched. Of course, my primary interest is in how to build networks that are less complex, rather than just understanding complexity…

This led me to do a lot of reading, write some drafts, and then write a book. During this process, I ended coining what I call the complexity triad—State, Optimization, and Surface. If you read the book on complexity, you can see my views on what the triad consisted of changed through in the writing—I started out with volume (of state), speed (of state), and optimization. Somehow, though, interaction surfaces need to play a role in the complexity puzzle.