Design Limitations Quotes

The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.

I only ever worked on interiors, and an interior is an interior. I don't know what they did about exteriors.

The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved. You cannot make a spoon that is better than a spoon... The book has been thoroughly tested, and it's very hard to see how it could be improved on for its current purposes.

I object to the hegemony of form in contemporary architecture. We have very advanced technological tools, but ultimately, we create buildings exactly like we used to before: We send the drawings to an engineer and let him struggle with figuring out how to build it.

What's interesting about textiles is that they are determined about three seasons in advance, that's why when you walk into a store you think "Gee, everything looks about the same."

I've found that people who design computers don't know a lot about displays.

Like you can't have a car that can take the kids to schools on Friday and win the grand prix on Saturday, you can't make a microscope that can do it all.

To me, form doesn't always follow function. Form has a life of its own, and at times, it may be the motivating force in design. When you're dealing with form as a sculptor, you feel that you are quite free in attempting to mould and shape things you want to do, but in architecture, it's much more difficult because it has to have a function.

Modernism, rebelling against the ornament of the 19th century, limited the vocabulary of the designer. Modernism emphasized straight lines, eliminating the expressive S curve. This made it harder to communicate emotions through design.

Great design will not sell an inferior product, but it will enable a great product to achieve its maximum potential.

It seems to be a law of design that for every advantage introduced through redesign, there is an accompanying unintended disadvantage.

Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that's because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection.

The boundaries of design are the same as the problem of perception.

Species go extinct because there are historical contraints built into a given body or a given design.

I don't really design for myself. It would be very limiting.

In nature two things do not occur-the wheel and good taste.

Usability methods are like sandpapering a chair. If you are making a chair, the sandpaper can make it smoother. But no amount of sandpaper will turn a chair into a table.

You can never design the best city, but you can design the best city you know how to design at this time.

There's more flexibility in the cartoon world than there is in video games. In video games, if I tweak a line, I could screw up the work of countless other people with my whim.

Engineers are great at many things. They're not necessarily great at recognizing basic human psychology.

I think anything can be forced to converge. The problem is that products are about tradeoffs, and you begin to make tradeoffs to the point where what you have left at the end of the day doesn't please anyone. You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but those things are probably not going to be pleasing to the user.

Industrial design is a superficial practice. You use your approach regardless of the project because there is no time for a deep understanding of a single product.

For me, some of the most intense creativity comes when something has to change for technical or design reasons, and you're trying to find a way to make it fit the fiction.

The world of design has been subjugated by the rigors of manufacturing and mass production.

The technology of the time dictated the way things looked.