Design Optimization Quotes

There are really two things that have to occur in order for a new technology to be affordable to the mass market. One is you need economies of scale. The other is you need to iterate on the design. You need to go through a few versions.

Engineering is achieving function while avoiding failure.

Successful engineering is all about understanding how things break or fail.

If I designed a computer with 200 chips, I tried to design it with 150. And then I would try to design it with 100. I just tried to find every trick I could in life to design things real tiny.

Failure is central to engineering. Every single calculation that an engineer makes is a failure calculation. Successful engineering is all about understanding how things break or fail.

Almost all quality improvement comes via simplification of design, manufacturing... layout, processes, and procedures.

A lot of what we are doing is getting design out of the way.

Informed clients are better clients, and they make for better design.

The work that we do during the winter is very important; we have a new bike and it's important to develop it during this time, and we start with this test.

When I am there at our global product development centers, I am meeting with the design team and reviewing design work being done there and meeting with engineers responsible for work being done specific to that region, meeting with purchasing team.

The best American manufacturers customize products to meet customer needs, reduce the time required to make them and constantly improve their design.

At the most basic level, prioritizing design also represents a practical consideration. It's far easier to design first and engineer later.

When a product is made, everyone hopes for the best. Whether it could have been better or not is more of an afterthought.

There is no way to find the best design except to try out as many designs as possible and discard the failures.

I mean, making simulations of what you're going to build is tremendously useful if you can get feedback from them that will tell you where you've gone wrong and what you can do about it.

Constrained optimization is the art of compromise between conflicting objectives. This is what design is all about. To find fault with biological design - as Stephen Jay Gould regularly does - because it misses some idealized optimum is therefore gratuitous. Not knowing the objectives of the designer, Gould is in no position to say whether the designer has proposed a faulty compromise among those objectives.

Study after study shows that the very best designers produce structures that are faster, smaller, simpler, clearer, and produced with less effort. The differences between the great and the average approach an order of magnitude.

I think in terms of the work we're doing now a lot of the UI cleanup... I see it getting much prettier.

Good design keeps the user happy, the manufacturer in the black and the aesthete unoffended.

The machines that are first invented to perform any particular movement are always the most complex, and succeeding artists generally discover that, with fewer wheels, with fewer principles of motion, than had originally been employed, the same effects may be more easily produced. The first systems, in the same manner, are always the most complex.

Engineering is about finding solutions with a commitment to ongoing refinement. That's what engineering training teaches you.

Don't ever make the mistake [of thinking] that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That's giving your intelligence much too much credit.

What I'm trying to do is bring certain of those engineering values into the design process, such that when you think about form you're already incorporating those performance criteria in the process of the generation of forms.

Peter Drucker has pointed out that it is a manager's job to "do things right." It is an executive's job to make sure "the right things" get done. Even the most rigorous eco-efficient business paradigm does not challenge basic practices and methods: a shoe, building, factory, car, or shampoo can remain fundamentally ill-designed even as the materials and processes involved in its manufacture become more "efficient."