What is a graceful system? I will try to explain here, but like the concept of grace itself, it naturally evades neat categorization.
I think of the interactions and systems I design from the perspective of a host – in compiling this (incomplete, developing) list of thoughts, I'm trying to call out what constitutes a successful visit, what endures after departure, what the essential duties/functions of a host are in a particular context.
Humans
Graceful systems operate with an understanding that humans necessarily imbue an interaction with uncertainty and risk. On the human side of this encounter, a graceful system accepts the person as they are, and requires little in the way of contortion to use the system. (And by contortion I don't mean every system must have fully-conversational speech recognition, I just mean that it is reasonable, and feels fine, to use the system: setting a specific temperature on a kettle can be fine if I'm just turning a dial, but it feels like a contortion when it becomes a chore, involving pairing wifi or giving away usage info, etc).
On the computer side, a graceful system eschews the record-everything approach currently used to hedge the maker's bets and easily afford
ambiguity and the implicit One way a graceful system might acknowledge this risk would be to embrace ambiguity in places traditionally left explicit
Forgetting
A great deal of human interactions and relationships depend critically on