Not being of the type to come up with pithy maxims of my own, I instead collect design, science, art, and creativity-related quotes for inspiration. Here, I share them with you, kind reader, in the form of this handy alphabetized list. Enjoy!
Quote count: 257
(If you know of a quote that you think should be in here, let me know!)
index:
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d
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f
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i
j
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m
n
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p
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If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.
RED ADAIR
At a meta level, design connects the dots between mere survival and humanism.
ERIK ADIGARD
Design is in everything we make, but it's also between those things. It's a mix of craft, science, storytelling, propaganda, and philosophy.
ERIK ADIGARD
[I]ntrinsic value follows meaning follows form follows economics follows function follows more economics follows market research.
ERIK ADIGARD
The inadequacy of the purely purpose-oriented form is revealed for what it is—a monotonous, impoverished boring practicality.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Be brave enough to live creatively. The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. You cannot get there by bus, only by hard work, risking and by not quite knowing what you are doing. What you will discover will be wonderful; yourself.
ALAN ALDA
The materials in every book tell a tale that rivals the one conveyed in the words.
IVAN AMATO
Technology is the campfire around which we tell our stories.
LAURIE ANDERSON
People think that design is styling. Design is not style. It's not about giving shape to the shell and not giving a damn about the guts. Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, and beauty to produce something that the world didn't know it was missing.
PAOLA ANTONELLI
Let each person exercise the art they know best.
ARISTOPHENES
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka!” but “That's funny…”
ISAAC ASIMOV
We are all victimized by the natural perversity of inanimate objects…and the assorted human beings who perpetuate and maintain this perversity.
ISAAC ASIMOV
As biological organisms made of matter, we are subject to the laws of physics and biology: as conscious persons who create our own history we are free to decide what that history shall be. Without science, we should have no notion of equality; without art, no notion of liberty.
W.H. AUDEN
He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator.
FRANCIS BACON
If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts. But if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.
FRANCIS BACON
We have no art. We do everything as well as possible.
Balinese villager
[Designers] think everything done by someone else is awful, and that they could do it better themselves, which explains why I designed my own living room carpet, I suppose.
CHRIS BANGLE
Style is engineering that gives you freedom.
CHRIS BANGLE
We ought to spend more time "wondering" than "doubting whether." Wondering is the key to progress.
GERALD HORTON BATH
Design is about making things good (and then better) and right (and fantastic) for the people who use and encounter them.
MATT BEALE
Don't think that even an engineer, when he buys a motor, takes it to bits to scrutinize it. Even he as a specialist buys from the external appearance. A motor ought to look like a birthday present.
PETER BEHRENS
Technology, like art, is a soaring exercise of the human imagination.
DANIEL BELL
When you get to the fork in the road, take it.
YOGI BERRA
You can observe a lot by watching.
YOGI BERRA
Graphics is the visual means of resolving logical problems.
BERTIN
To say that something is designed means it has intentions that go beyond its function. Otherwise it's just planning.
AYSE BIRSEL
Art is passion practiced with great discipline. Science is discipline practiced with great passion.
DR. KEITH BLACK
Human history shows that any effort to confine the inquiring human mind, to seek to bar the spirit of inquiry, is doomed to failure.
BOARD OF CONSULTANTS TO THE SECRETARY OF STATE'S COMMITTEE ON ATOMIC ENERGY
The opposite of every great idea is another great idea.
NIELS BOHR
You are not thinking. You are merely being logical.
NIELS BOHR to Albert Einstein
Typography at its best is a visual form of language linking timelessness and time.
ROBERT BRINGHURST
Product design and development is a combination of creativity and analysis. But it depends on communication.
MICHAEL BREMER
Writing is the ultimate decision-making experience. Every paragraph, every sentence, every word is a decision.
MICHAEL BREMER
Telling the future by looking at the past assumes that conditions remain constant. This is like driving a car by looking in the rearview mirror.
HERB BRODY
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
EDMUND BURKE
Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood.
DANIEL BURNHAM
The purpose of technology is not to confuse the brain but to serve the body.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
Someday all Americans must be able to program their own VCRs.
GEORGE BUSH
The question of whether a device will come into being depends upon three things: first, whether there is a practical use for it that warrants its development and manufacturing costs; second, whether the laws of physics applying to the elements available for its design allow the attainment of the needed ranges, sensitivities, or the like; and third, whether the pertinent art of manufacture has advanced sufficiently to allow a useful embodiment to be built successfully.
VANNEVAR BUSH
The function, what a nice form!
ACHILLE CASTIGLIONE
It is this quality, the power of seeing order in apparent confusion, that has marked the work of all great men.
JOHN CHADWICK
Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it's the only one you have.
EMIL'E CHARTIER
Good design, at least part of the time, includes the criteria of being direct in relation to the problem at hand‚ not obscure, trendy, or stylish. A new language, visual or verbal, must be couched in a language that is already understood.
IVAN CHERMAYEFF
Sometimes there is simply no need to be either clever or original.
IVAN CHERMAYEFF
Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, it's unlikely you will step up and take responsibility for making it so. If you assume that there's no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, there are opportunities to change things, there's a chance you may contribute to making a better world. The choice is yours.
NOAM CHOMSKY
Some consider it noble to have a method; others consider it noble not to have a method. Not to have a method is bad; to stop entirely at method is worse still. One should at first observe rules severely, then change them in an intelligent way. The aim of posessing method is to seem finally as if one had no method.
CHIEH TZU YUAN HUA CHUAN
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
Fanatics are defined by their hatreds; free people by their humanity.
BILL CLINTON
Trying to get people to reason in a way that is not natural for them is like trying to teach a pig to sing. You don't accomplish anything and you annoy the pig.
E. JEFFEREY CONKLIN & WILLIAM WEIL
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
E. JEFFEREY CONKLIN & WILLIAM WEIL
Form follows function straight to hell.
ALAN COOPER
A good piece of technology dreams of the day when it will be replaced by a newer piece of technology. This is one definition of progress.
DOUGLAS COUPLAND
What comes from the heart lands on the heart creatively.
DENNY DENT
Continuity is not only the uninterrupted steps from one point to another, but it is also the cohesive force that holds a diverse composition together.
DONIS A. DONDIS
If there is an information revolution, it's over: information won.
DIANA LADY DOUGAN
Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail.
THEODORE DREISER
The products we design are going to be ridden in, sat upon, looked at, talked into, activated, operated, or in some way used by people individually or en masse. If the point of contact between the product and the people
becomes a point of friction, then the industrial designer has failed. If, on the other hand, people are made safer, more comfortable, more eager to purchase, more efficient—or just plain happier—the industrial designer has succeeded.
HENRY DREYFUSS
Client wants: 1. Good, 2. Fast, 3. Cheap. Designer replies: Pick two.
HUGH DUBBERLY
Everything that can be invented has been invented.
CHARLES DUELL, Commissioner, U.S. Patent Office, 1899
Symmetry is static‚ that is to say, quiet; that is to say, inconspicuous.
WILLIAM ADDISON DWIGGINS
A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible.
FREEMAN DYSON
Your mind is like a tipi. Leave the entrance flap open so that the fresh air can enter and clear out the smoke of confusion.
CHIEF EAGLE, Teton Sioux
[Design is] a plan for arranging elements in such a way as to best accomplish a particular purpose.
CHARLES EAMES
Genius? Nothing! Sticking to it is the genius! Any other bright-minded fellow can accomplish just as much if he will stick like hell and remember nothing that's any good works by itself. You've got to make the damn thing work!…I failed my way to success.
THOMAS EDISON
Invention is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.
THOMAS EDISON
Let the public throw bouquets to the inventors and in time we will all be happy.
THOMAS EDISON
I never think of the future, for it comes soon enough.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
Genius seems to consistent merely in trueness of sight.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Knowledge is the antidote to fear.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The engineer's principal work is to discover and conserve natural resources of materials and forces, including the human, and to create means for utilizing these resources with minimal cost and waste and with maximum useful results.
ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA
We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free.
EPICTETUS, Roman philosopher and former slave
Form follows emotion.
HARTMUT ESSLINGER
Maps are useful but never neutral.
LUCY FELLOWES
Most products are ugly. The harsh reality is that in many of these markets, form follows funding. And that products go where the market takes them.
BRAN FERREN
If design isn't profitable, then it's art.
HENRIK FISKER
Form follows finances instead of function.
IRA FLATOW
One sometimes finds what one is not looking for.
SIR ALEXANDER FLEMING
Don't find a fault. Find a remedy.
HENRY FORD
The function of the machine is to liberate man from brute burdens, and release his energies to the building of his intellectual and spiritual powers for conquests in the fields of thought and higher action.
HENRY FORD
No design works unless it embodies ideas that are held common by the people for whom the object is intended.
ADRIAN FORTY
If you would not be forgotten, as
soon as you are dead and rotten,
either write things worth reading,
or do the things worth the writing.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
I am human: Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate.
Slogan of the FREE SPEECH MOVEMENT
Technology…the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.
MAX FRISCH
Dare to be naive.
R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER
I am enthusiastic over humanity's extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuities. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat may come along and make a fortuitous life preserver. This is not to say, though, that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday's fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem.
R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER
All good technology should be used to piss off people's parents.
NEIL GAIMAN
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked….A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.
J. GALL
The very greatest is the alphabet, for in it lies the deepest wisdom; yet only he can fathom it, who truly knows how to put it together.
EMMANUEL GEIBEL
The best computer scientists are…technologists who crave beauty.
DAVID GELERNTER
The future was and remains the quintessential American art form. Other nations sit back and let their futures happen; we construct ours. We can let the future happen, or take the trouble to imagine it. We can imagine it dark or bright—and in the long run, that's how it will be.
DAVID GELERNTER
Letters are things, not pictures of things.
ERIC GILL
I had a monumental idea this morning, but I didn't like it.
SAMUEL GOLDWYN
Form follows function.
HORATIO GREENOUGH (popularized by LOUIS SULLIVAN)
Simplicity does not mean want or poverty. It does not mean the absence of any decor, or absolute nudity. It only means that the decor should belong intimately to the design proper, and that anything foreign to it should be taken away.
PAUL JACQUES GRILLO
Ease of use and ease of learning are not the same.
KATHERINE HARAMUNDANIS
Every tool carries with it the spirit with which it has been created.
WERNER KARL HEISENBERG
Computer design is often bad design done on a computer.
MIKE HICKS
I am convinced that we humans are just at the beginning of our journey, on our way to becoming something more wonderful than we can imagine.
DANNY HILLIS
What people mean by the word "technology" is the stuff that doesn't really work yet.
DANNY HILLIS
Life is short, Art long, Occasion sudden and dangerous, Experience deceitful, and Judgment difficult.
HIPPOCRATES
No, Watson, this was not done by accident, but by design.
SHERLOCK HOLMES (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
Action will remove the doubt that theory cannot solve.
TEHYI HSIEH
…it's very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better.
JONATHAN IVE
Invention has become more automatic, less the result of intuition or flashes of genius and more a matter of deliberate design.
JOHN JEWKES, DAVID SAWERS, RICHARD STILLERMAN
Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.
STEVE JOBS
Many things difficult to design prove easy to perform.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
People want to run their computers and have them do the things that they really don't want or have time to do themselves.
MICHAEL H. JORDAN
Thoughts exchanged by one and another are not the same in one room as in another.
LOUIS I. KAHN
To me, nothing is more vibrant than having the power to do something but not having the experience of knowing what's right and what's wrong.
TIBOR KALMAN
We can have a transparent telephone. But I don't mind having a telephone which looks like a table-top sculpture. Nice to have it! So then this is the choice: I can have a choice to have beautifully sculptured machines or transparent machines!
TOSHIMO KAWAHARA
We've probably designed 4,000 products at IDEO over my career, and for every one of them I'd like to send a little note with it that says, "I'm sorry that it's in this present state. Given what I know now, if I could start over again it would be a lot better."
DAVID KELLEY
Success has many fathers.
JOHN F. KENNEDY
The more technology becomes complicated inside, the more it has to be simple outside.
DERRICK DE KERCKHOVE
The simplest way to assure sales is to keep changing the product—the market for new things is indefinitely elastic. One of the fundamental purposes of advertising, styling, and research is to foster a healthy dissatisfaction.
CHARLES KETTERING, former (1950's) GM president
Television is a medium, so called because it is neither rare nor well done.
ERNIE KOVACS
A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea.
MILAN KUNDERA
If I do not know that I do not know, I think I know.
If I do not know that I know, I think I do not know.
R.D. LAING
A design isn't finished until somebody is using it.
BRENDA LAUREL
You don't have to please everyone—you have to please the user.
BRENDA LAUREL
Science has done absolutely nothing about noise. The worst design flaw in the human body is that you can't close your ears. The reason you can't close your ears is, if a lion was coming, you had to wake up. Today no lions are coming. Beeping trucks are coming. I read the other day that the guy who invented the beep when trucks go backward, he died. I thought: Of course—he dies, I have to listen to it.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
The present is big with the future, the future might be read in the past, the distant is expressed in the near.
LEIBNIZ's law of continuity
I roamed the countryside searching for answers to things I did not understand.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
I hold that while a man exists, it is his duty to improve not only his own condition, but to assist in ameliorating mankind.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Whatever a man imagines he can attain, if he doesn't become too arrogant and encroach on the rights of the gods.
CHARLES LINDBERGH
Form, which should be the clean-cut expression of mechanical excellence, has become sensuous and organic.
RAYMOND LOEWY
No manufacturer, from General Motors to the Little Lulu Novelty Company, would think of putting a product on the market without benefit of a designer.
RAYMOND LOEWY
Ugliness does not sell.
RAYMOND LOEWY
The most reliable appliance has simplicity and quality, does what is demanded of it, is economical to use, easy to maintain, and just as easy to repair. …It also sells best and looks good.
RAYMOND LOEWY
I am not sure that I want my tv, which is my window on the world, to be anything other than a window. Don't give it to me with pink stuff on it, it's a window and windows are made of glass.
PAT LONDLANDE-DADE
Only the most foolish of mice would hide in a cat's ear, but only the wisest of cats would think to look there.
SCOTT LOVE
I make solutions that nobody wants to problems that don't exist.
ALVIN LUSTIG
Simplicity of device is always the sign of the master, whether in science or in art.
RICHARD C. MACLAURIN
I have broken the blue boundary of color limits, come out into the white; beside me comrade-pilots swim in this infinity. I have established the semaphore of Suprematism. I have beaten the lining of the colored sky, torn it away and in the sack that formed itself, I have put color and knotted it. Swim! The free white sea, infinity, lies before you.
KASIMIR MALEVICH
The designer is a visually literate person, just as an editor is expected by training and inclination to be versed in language and literature, but to call the former an artist by occupation is as absurd as to refer to the latter as a poet.
DOUGLAS MARTIN
Questions about whether design is necessary or affordable are quite beside the point: design is inevitable. The alternative to good design is bad design, not no design at all. Everyone makes design decisions all the time without realizing it—like Moliere's M. Jourdain who discovered he had been speaking prose all his life—and good design is simply the result of making these decisions consciously, at the right stage, and in consultation with others as the need arises.
DOUGLAS MARTIN
It seems that one only has to be able to watch television and hold a potato at the same time in order to be equipped to be a designer these days.
GLENN MARTINEZ
We become what we behold..we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.
MARSHALL MCLUHAN
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
H.L. MENCKEN
More power and more choice and more freedom require more wisdom if they are to add up to more humanity.
EMMANUEL G. MESTHENE
Technology often reveals what technology has not created.
EMMANUEL G. MESTHENE
We live in a culture where the one who shouts the loudest gets the most attention. It's not in the vulgar, it's not in the shock that one finds art. And it's not the excessively beautiful. It's in between; it's in nuance.
DUANE MICHALS
Products never speak for themselves. Someone had to teach us that a chair is meant for sitting on, that a spoon is for putting food into the mouth…The medium is not the message.
PAUL MIJKSENAAR and PIET WESTENDORP
I doubt whether all mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being.
JOHN STUART MILL
Instead of asking, "How much damage will the work in question bring about?" why not ask, "How much good? How much joy?"
HENRY MILLER
Eventually, robots will make everything.
MARVIN MINSKY
The machine replaced human labor and now human brain-power. But I think technology's next step will be to work for the spirit, the heart.
SOTORI MIYAGI
It's not rocket science. It's social science—the science of understanding people's needs and their unique relationship with art, literature, history, music, work, philosophy, community, technology, and psychology. The act of design is structuring and creating that balance.
CLEMENT MOK
All consumers are equal in their right to expect products to be safe and usable regardless of a person's physical or mental capabilities.
PATTIE MOORE
Good design defuses the tension between functional and aesthetic goals precisely because it works within the boundaries defined by the functional requirements of the communication problem. Unlike the fine arts, which exists for their own sake, design must always solve a particular real-world problem.
KEVIN MULLET & DARRELL SANO
Endeavour—with most diligent labour, O aspiring artist!—to master content. The form will rise to meet you.
MULTATULI
It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious.
Corollary to MURPHY's Law
Designers are not highly paid cake decorators.
SPENCER MURRELL
Method helps intuition when it is not transformed into dictatorship. Intuition augments method if it does not instill anarchy. In every moment of our semiotic existence, method and intuition complement one another.
MIHAI NADIN
[Industrial design in 50 years] will be less about looks and more about personality of artifacts.
NICHOLAS NEGROPONTE
Design is easy. All you do is stare at the screen until drops of blood form on your forehead.
MARTY NEUMEIER (paraphrasing GENE FOWLER)
Design is intelligence made visible.
DON NEWGREN
I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy, playing on the seashore, and diverting myself, in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
SIR ISAAC NEWTON
A man who works with his hands is a laborer; a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist.
LOUIS NIZER
On the day when two armies will be able to annihilate each other in one second all civilized nations will recoil
from war in horror and disband their forces.
ALFRED NOBEL
Attractive things work better.
DONALD NORMAN
Keeping an open mind is a virtue, but not so open that your brains fall out.
JAMES OBERG
In most agencies, account executives outnumber the copywriters two to one. If you were a dairy farmer, would you employ twice as many milkers as you had cows?
DAVID OGILVY
What use would this company make of an electrical toy?
CARL ORTON, president of Western Union, to Alexander Graham Bell, who offered all rights to the telephone for $100,000
We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams.
Wandering by lone sea breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world forever, it seems.
ARTHUR O'SHAUGHNESSY
Style impresses, true beauty expresses.
CHRIS PACIONE
All designed tools and objects are sort of extensions of human abilities, and they do tend to make life richer for us. But, an awful lot of designs, especially in this country, make life a lot more inconvenient. I'm thinking, for instance, of high-fidelity units that have so many switches and toggles and buttons and things that they confuse most people.
VICTOR PAPANEK
The only important thing about design is how it relates to people.
VICTOR PAPANEK
Our opportunity, as designers, is to learn how to handle the complexity, rather than shy away from it, and to realize that the big art of design is to make complicated things simple.
TIM PARSEY
Chance favors the prepared mind.
LOUIS PASTEUR
Make three correct guesses consecutively and you will establish a reputation as an expert.
LAWRENCE J. PETER
Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them.
LAWRENCE J. PETER
…high end does not necessarily equal high price. It's a matter of attitude.
TOM PETERS
Form follows failure.
HENRY PETROSKI
Our expectations for a technology rise with its advancement.
HENRY PETROSKI
Personalising one's own space like this leads naturally on to the personalisation of other possessions as a statement of identity.
PHILIPS Vision of the Future
Computers are worthless. They can only give you answers.
PABLO PICASSO
Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.
PABLO PICASSO
I am always doing things that I cannot do; that's how I get to do them.
PABLO PICASSO
Technology frees the task of design and production from technical limitations.
GERARD PIEL
Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers of the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1 1/2 tons.
POPULAR SCIENCE, March 1949
Function is a fantasy…the form of designed things is decided by choice or else by chance; but it is never actually entailed by anything whatever.
DAVID PYE
We have received an invitation. A very unusual invitation. Maybe it is to go to a banquet. The Earth has never been invited to a banquet. It would be impolite to refuse.
XI QIAOMU (from Contact by Carl Sagan)
Art is an idea that has found its perfect visual expression. And design is the vehicle by which this expression is made possible. Art is a noun, and design is a noun and also a verb. Art is a product and design is a process. Design is the foundation of all the arts.
PAUL RAND
The public is more familiar with bad design than good design. It is, in effect, conditioned to prefer bad design, because that is what it lives with. He new becomes threatening, the old reassuring.
PAUL RAND
Objects do not have meaning. But if an object is thoughtful we project meaning onto it in daily life.
KARIM RASHID
The future is itself a story, and predictions are stories we tell to amaze ourselves, to give hope to the desperate, to jolt the complacent.
DAVID REMNICK
They are called computers, simply because computation is the only significant job that has so far been given to them … To describe its potentialities, the computer needs a new name. Perhaps as good a name as any is "information machine."
LOUIS RIDENOUR, 1952
I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
STEPHEN ROBERTS
Designing a product is designing a relationship.
STEVE ROGERS
Less is more.
LUDWIG MIES van der ROHE
Everyone is a lot of people to design for.
JOSHUA ROSE
It is hard to prevent oneself from believing what one so keenly desires.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU
Our bodies are the time machine.
RUDY RUCKER
Creativity…involves the power to originate, to break away from the existing ways of looking at things, to move freely in the realm of the imagination, to create and recreate worlds fully in one's mind—while supervising all this with a critical inner eye.
OLIVER SACKS
One of these days an alien is going to say, "Hi, I'm here." And everything you thought about your world is going to change.
NADJA SALERNO-SONNENBERG
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
CARL SAGAN
There is in this Universe much of what seems to be design.
CARL SAGAN
We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers.
CARL SAGAN
Perfection is not reached when there is nothing to be added anymore, but when there is nothing to be left out anymore.
ANTOINE de SAINT-EXUPERY
…if, before every action, we were to begin by weighing up the consequences, thinking about them in earnest, first the immediate consequences, then the probable, then the possible, then the imaginable ones, we should never move beyond the point where our first thought brought us to a halt.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO
It works better if you plug it in.
SATTINGER's Law
Design is a means toward accomplishing the end goals of serving markets and generating profits. Furthermore, design is an element in social responsibility. Good design allows "form to complement performance." The way things look is not irrelevant to the way things work: how they work is how they should look.
THOMAS F. SCHUTTE
It is easy to fail when designing an interactive experience. Designers fail when they do not know the audience, integrate the threads of content and context, welcome the public properly, or make clear what the experience is and what the audience's role in it will be.
EDWIN SCHLOSSBERG
The true scientist never loses the faculty of amazement.
HANS SELYE
The devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Some men see things as they are, and say why? I dream of things
that never were, and ask why not?
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
You can either get something done or get the credit for it, but not both.
(REUBEN) SMEED'S RULE
The design process, at its best, integrates the aspirations of art, science, and culture.
JEFF SMITH
Industrial design is the process of developing an elegant and functional improvement to the physical interface between man and machine-made products.
ROBERT GLENN SMITH
Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.
SUSAN SONTAG
These days, information is a commodity being sold. And designers—including the newly defined subset of information designers and information architects—have a responsible role to play. We are interpreters, not merely translators, between sender and receiver. What we say and how we say it makes a difference. If we want to speak to people, we need to know their language. In order to design for understanding, we need to understand design.
ERIK SPIEKERMANN
You cannot not communicate.
ERIK SPIEKERMANN
My dream appliance circa 2050 has one big dial on it, and when I twist it to the right, my IQ goes up to 450.
BRUCE STERLING
If you begin to think you're changing the culture of the world, just ask your mom what she thinks you do for a living.
JURGEN STRINGENZ
Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all details and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.
WILLIAM STRUNK
We are prop managers and set builders in the wings of the cultural stage. No one knows who we are but they do feel the results of our work.
BILL STUMPF
Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.
JONATHAN SWIFT
Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.
ALBERT von SZENT-GYORGY
Any modern invention of consequence will be found exploited in some measure by those whose social conscience is relatively primitive.
TEMPORARY NATIONAL ECONOMIC COMMITTEE
So much has already been written about everything that you can't find out anything about it.
JAMES THURBER
Sir, I have tested your machine. It adds new terror to life and makes death a long felt want.
SIR HERBERT ROBERT BEERBOHM TREE, on examining a gramophone
Technology makes it possible for people to gain control over everything, except over technology.
JOHN TUDOR
Good design is a lot like clear thinking made visual.
EDWARD TUFTE
As soon as you have made a thought, laugh at it.
LAO TZU
If it works, it's obsolete.
unknown source
A mind that is all logic is like a knife that is all blade—it hurts the hand that uses it.
unknown source
The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.
PAUL VALŠRY
An ellipse here, a square there, some type‚ Boom! It's done.
RICK VALICENTI
Beauty is the result of clarity and system and not of optical illusion.
HENRY van de VELDE
Bring ideas in and entertain them royally, for one of them may be the king.
MARK van DOREN
Less is a bore.
ROBERT VENTURI
The machine technology takes no cognizance of conventionally established rules of precedence; it knows neither
manners nor breeding and can make no use of any of the attributes of worth.
THORSTEIN VEBLEN
Common sense is not so common.
VOLTAIRE
In signs, one sees an advantage for discovery that is greatest when they express the exact nature of a thing briefly and, as it were, picture it; then, indeed, the labor of thought is wonderfully diminished.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM von LEIBNIZ
Science, as well as technology, will in the near and in the farther future increasingly turn from problems of intensity, substance, and energy, to problems of structure, organization, information, and control.
JOHN von NEUMANN
Planning is everything; plans are nothing.
HELMUTH von MOLTKE
Home is no longer a location, home is a concept. I want the feelings of home wherever I am.
WATTS WACKER
This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.
HORACE WALPOLE
God is to be found in the details.
ABY WARBURG
I think there is a world market for maybe [about] five computers.
THOMAS J. WATSON JR., IBM Chair, 1943
Good design is good business.
THOMAS J. WATSON JR.
Great design will not sell an inferior product, but it will enable a great product to achieve its maximum potential.
THOMAS J. WATSON JR.
No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence, or whose attitude is patronizing.
E.B. WHITE
It is the business of the future to be dangerous.
ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD
Consistency is the last resort of the unimaginative.
OSCAR WILDE
Imagination is imitative—the real innovation lies in criticism.
OSCAR WILDE
Always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
Everything that can be said, can be said clearly.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
…designers can make life more bearable by producing stuff that touches its audience rather than fucks them in the head.
JON WOZENCRAFT
I never design a building before I've seen the site and met the people who will be using it.
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT
Less is more only where more is no good.
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT
It is possible to fly without motors, but not without knowledge & skill.
WILBUR WRIGHT
Information anxiety is the black hole between data and knowledge, and it happens when information doesn't tell us what we want or need to know.
RICHARD SAUL WURMAN
The fundamental failure of most graphic, product, architectural, and even urban design is its insistence on serving the God of Looking-Good rather than the God of Being-Good.
RICHARD SAUL WURMAN
more to come…
For a quote's source, just ask me. I might have it.