Marc Newson Quotes

Usually, the best ideas come from having to fix a really hard problem.

Health care is a design problem. Dependence on foreign oil is a design problem. To some extent, poverty is a design problem. We need design thinkers to solve those problems, and most people who are in positions of political power are not design thinkers, to put it mildly.

I see myself as a problem solver, creating solutions.

Design is a solution to a problem. Art is a question to a problem.

What I love about design is the artistic and scientific complexity that also becomes useful . . . Great designers also pursue a mission. Great designers design with mankind in mind . . . The crossroads of science and art, innovation and inspiration are what I love about design.

I am enthusiastic over humanity’s extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuity. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that 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.

We may need to solve problems not by removing the cause but by designing the way forward even if the cause remains in place.

In The 3rd Alternative, Stephen Covey urges us to chart a course beyond the suboptimal solutions to all our crises - beyond left and right, and beyond the many false choices in front of us. The 3rdAlternative is a wise and welcome echo of Einstein's warning that the problems we're facing today cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.

Don't underestimate the power of your vision to change the world. Whether that world is your office, your community, an industry or a global movement, you need to have a core belief that what you contribute can fundamentally change the paradigm or way of thinking about problems.

At Stanford, we teach 'design thinking' - that is, we put together small, interdisciplinary groups to figure out what the true needs are and then to apply the art of engineering to serve them.

I like working intensely, then going away and thinking about it, working out why it didn't work and then coming back to it. It makes the work richer, I think.

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

Architects often have a mindset where you solve a problem, so you have a set of needs that you have to address. Often I feel that my projects have to have concrete applications.

It's always the organizations that are resource constrained that come up with the good ideas to win.

Art and science have their meeting point in method.

I think architects are often at their best when faced with restraints.

In the computer industry, you've got an interdisciplinary team of people who can come together, attack the problem, and work in a collaborative style. You knock down one problem after another, cobble things together, and then hopefully turn the crank at some point.

A really important thing when you come up with a concept is that you solve a pervasive problem for people, and you don't try to create a new way to do something that isn't necessarily broken.

I wouldn't suggest that being resourceful has anything to do with doing something illegal or unethical, but I've definitely noticed a pattern of being 'creative.'

All of our movies are lower budget, and that makes them more interesting, too: we have to come up with solutions other than throwing money at problems.

For Stripe, being inventive is just about applying the right solutions from other areas.

When trying to innovate, most people stop after 10-15 possibilities, failing to recognize that their first ideas are usually the most obvious ones.

I apply the term 'creativity' broadly... it's problem solving. We are all faced with problems, and we have to address them and think of something new, and that's where creativity comes in.

I never pick up an item without thinking of how I might improve it.

If you look at the world today, there are as many solutions as there are problems. I think that is a big part of creativity. That's why I started Urban Zen. Because I wanted to dress and address people.