Attention as Binding Constraint (Simon)

Simon's 1971 paper 'Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World' articulated the principle that has defined the information era more clearly than any subsequent analysis. The core claim is that information and attention are metabolically related: information consumes attention, and a wealth of information therefore creates a poverty of attention. The design implication follows directly — well-designed information systems should conserve attention rather than maximize information, delivering the minimum necessary for the decision at hand and filtering everything else before it reaches the decision-maker. The principle was prescient in 1971 and has been systematically violated by the subsequent half-century of information technology, culminating in AI tools that are, by default, extraordinary information expanders but poor attention conservers. Simon's framework predicts the cognitive exhaustion that empirical research has since documented: builders drowning in high-quality output because the systems producing the output are designed to maximize what they deliver rather than to conserve the attentional capacity that determines whether what is delivered can be productively used.