Multifunctionality Quotes

If you see cattle as a source of organic manure, animal energy, as well as milk products, then Indian cattle are not inferior. It is only when you measure them as milk machines that they become inferior. What if we measured the dairy cows of America or Jersey or the Swiss Alps in terms of their work functions? They would be terribly inferior.

There's no other product that changes function like the computer.

There is no reason to believe ... that the "essential purpose" of language is "communication". Language can be used to transmit information, but it also serves many other purposes: to establish relations among people, to express or clarify thought, for play, for creative mental activity, to gain understanding, and so on. In my opinion, there is no reason to accord privileged status to one or the other of these modes.

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.

I personally won't have anything live in my house that can't move the car on street-sweeping day or grate carrots. Plus, I don't mind being talked to harshly. I want to be challenged by something more complex than a Wheaton terrier.

Hospitality is about trying to support multiple functions in one space.

I want to make each piece of clothing work 15 different ways.

I have one very basic rule when it comes to "good ideas". A good idea is not an idea that solves a problem cleanly. A good idea is an idea that solves several things at the same time. The mark of good coding is not that the program does what you want, it's that it also does something that you didn't start out wanting.

A property of an organism enters into its life (and survival) in many different ways, some more salient than others. But there is no simple notion of its being "for" some function.

We seem to want one vehicle to carry people and soccer balls and hay bales.

Everything may serve a lower as well as a higher use.

The old injunction 'Don't talk with your mouth full' is based on the presumption that, however multifunctional a mouth may be, it should only perform one job at a time. Humans have found a way around this limitation in the form of food writing.

Look at spiders. They use about eight different properties of silk for different functions. The spider is like a multimaterial 3D printer.

Where I come from, we're more about efficiency,' he replies. 'A knife like this'll skewer food, smear butter, and slit throats all at the same time.

People don't want lots and lots of single purpose devices. They do not want to have to learn how to set up something for photos, another thing for music, another thing for video.

I think kitchen real estate is very valuable, so something has to perform multiple functions for me to give it space in my drawers.