Fat free Design, True Minimalism or Missing the Point?

I'm a great believer of minimalism. For me the beauty of any design lies in achieving the necessary functionality in as bare a setting as possible. Designers all over the world favor minimalist design philosophies and it shows in most of the things that are designed today. Be it consumer electronics, decor products, daily use items, automobiles; designers as well as the end-users have really begun to appreciate (or to take it forward, live by) minimalism.
Here are a few products that set the benchmark for minimalist design:
1) The Leaf Lamp by Yves Behar

2) The Macbook Air by Apple

3) Alparda’s Arc Desk by Aziz Sariyer



4) Water Bottle design by Fig Tree

Well I guess, this list can go on and on. But the point I want to make here is that, in the attempt to be minimalist, designers tend to commit some basic mistakes. Here's an example:

Flash memory giants Kingston launched a very minimalist cap-less pen drive - DataTraveler 100


The Pen-drive features a neat slide mechanism to lift/drop the USB head. The aim, from what I see, is to do away with a cap and have a compact setup.

But there are some real flaws that should have been looked at:
1) The slider has no locking mechanism at the top (when the USB head is completely out) and so it becomes a pain to insert this pen drive in USB ports (especially hard to access USB ports -like behind the CPU of a PC). Every time, you try inserting the drive, the USB head starts to slip back in. You really have to press the slider hard to plug the drive in. Plug and Play pen drive - Well, not quite!
2) The open top means you better keep it away from water. Aaah, I guess that washes away all the minimalism. :)

So the point that I am trying to make here is that while designing its good to to have an overall outlook where you are looking to create minimalism but then it shouldn't be the case that you miss the point in a big way and actually create tons of problems for the end-users.

Here's a remarkable talk by Captain Organic - Ross Lovegrove about the power and beauty of Organic design (Fat free design) on TED.

Lovegrove's talk

Enjoy!