Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.
Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.
Technology frightens me to death. It's designed by engineers to impress other engineers, and they always come with instruction booklets that are written by engineers for other engineers - which is why almost no technology ever works.
When government programs aren't working, those on the Left tend to support more funding, while those on the Right want to scrap them altogether. It is better to ask whether the problem is complexity and poor design. We can solve those problems - sometimes without spending a penny.
The design of everyday things is in great danger of becoming the design of superfluous, overloaded, unnecessary things.
All software sucks.
In New York, you have thousands of buildings that have never been renovated, that have horrible designs, that are really cramped and terrible.
Good technology is intuitive - the cellphone forces you to become an engineer.
When a device as simple as a door has to come with an instruction manual—even a one-word manual—then it is a failure, poorly designed.
DOS is ugly and interferes with users' experience.
It costs a lot to build bad products.
Software sucks because users demand it to.
But look what we have built low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums. Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.
The Kaws IV is terrible. That's a bad hoop shoe. That suede rubs against your feet. I had to triple my socks. The leather on the inside is a no-go.
Ah, 'Kismet,' or Carry On Camel, as we called it. I thought the show was shocking. It was the worst designed production ever but it's got a fantastic score. It's not an awfully good book though. You really have to work hard to eke out any laughs from that script.
They sit there in committees day after day, And they each put in a color and it comes out gray. And we all have heard the saying, which is true as well as witty, That a camel is a horse that was designed by a committee.
I find web browsing, checking multiple email accounts, and Google mapping rather tiresome on an iPhone - the iPhone's native interface, for all its supposed perfection, has all kinds of wrong baked in - and the screen is just far too small.
Far too few designers put any thought into usability, ending up with a great product that's completely inaccessible.
The air conditioning in Lamborghinis used to be an asthmatic sitting in the dashboard blowing at you through a straw.
Bel Air, I am convinced, was laid out by some diabolic sadist who deliberately decided not to use a compass or a surveyor.
We are producing urban places which are disjointed and disconnected and not worthy of our civilisation
A bad system will beat a good person every time.
If you were going to protect Buckingham Palace, you wouldn't put a tunnel in halfway down the Mall. If you wanted to protected Wembley Stadium, you wouldn't put a tunnel halfway up Wembley Way.
I could open a thousand Excel documents and still never think to scroll past a wall of empty rows to see if, hidden beneath them, there is a tab I need to click. Just doesn't occur to me. Because, design.
Noise is a parasite. Anything noisy is poorly designed.
