Industrial Design Quotes

In short, capitalism depends on ever-growing amounts of state intervention in the market for its survival, and the system is hitting the point where the teat runs dry.

The result is a system in which governments and corporations are increasingly hollowed out. And meanwhile, growing up within this corporate capitalist "integument," things like open source software and culture, open-source industrial design, permaculture and low-overhead garage micromanufacturing eat the corporate-state economy alive. An ever-growing share of labor and production are disappearing into relocalized resilient economies, self-employment, worker cooperatives and the informal and household economy. In the end, they will skeletonize the corporate dinosaurs like a swarm of piranha. ~ Kevin A. Carson

The first 10 years of my professional life had only to do with running away from my father. He was a wonderful cabinet-maker, and me being the eldest son, I had to take over his shop, his profession and so on and so on. I tried to escape by going to art school and then going on to industrial design and then interior design. ~ Peter Zumthor

Most people think that George Nelson, Charles Eames and Eliot Noyes invented industrial design. That is, of course, an exaggeration. George did it without any assistance from the other two. ~ Bill N. Lacy

A man-made thing that produces pleasure (and criticism) by somehow taping into the order of the universe is beautiful. Making beautiful things makes our lives worthwhile. My teacher, and one of the founders of the Pratt industrial design program, Rowena Reed Kostellow, said, "Pure, unadulterated beauty should be the goal of civilization." From a pragmatic point of view, for something to be beautiful, it has to work. In order to make this idea clearer I have combined the ideas of beauty and function into one word: Beautility. ~ Tucker Viemeister

There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a few. ~ Victor Papanek

Every other piece of industrial design is a pot or a dish or something insignificant. But when you have a chair, it's like a sculpture of a person: it's alive. It's big. You can't miss it. It's a 'look at me!' item. ~ Charles Pollock

Industrial design keeps the customer happy, his client in the black and the designer busy. ~ Raymond Loewy

I do very little industrial design. I'm asked a lot, but I certainly don't see myself as an industrial designer. ~ David Chipperfield

... no industrial designer worth his salt, or our attention, has been trained to work exclusively on any particular product, unless by accident. What he has been trained to do is practice a process called design, a process that includes esthetic choices but does not consist only of them. ~ Ralph Caplan

Everything at Apple can be best understood through the lens of designing. Whether it's designing the look and feel of the user experience, or the industrial design, or the system design, and even things like how the boards were laid out. ~ John Sculley

I think time is a constraint to destroy and then reinvent. If you give me a constraint, I'll accept it. But I always try to move it around, or to readapt it. Ecco! If you lock me in a room, well I'll go out through the window! I always remember Achille Castiglioni, one of my mentors, and he always said that in industrial design you have the idea, the fantasy, the concepts - that's the marmalade! - but the constraint of the brief is the bread. You need both in order to find structure for your ideas. ~ Patricia Urquiola

If you really want to be right (or at least improve the odds of being right), you have to start by acknowledging your fallibility, deliberately seeking out your mistakes, and figuring out what caused you to make them. This truth has long been recognized in domains where being right is not just a zingy little ego boost but a matter of real urgency: in transportation, industrial design, food and drug safety, nuclear energy, and so forth. When they are at their best, such domains have a productive obsession with error. They try to imagine every possible reason a mistake could occur, they prevent as many of them as possible, and they conduct exhaustive postmortems on the ones that slip through. By embracing error as inevitable, these industries are better able to anticipate mistakes, prevent them, and respond appropriately when those prevention efforts fail. ~ Kathryn Schulz

Us visual thinkers like me, be good at things like industrial design, graphics, art, those kind of jobs. ~ Temple Grandin

I want industrial design to be a public subject. I want people to love objects the way they love clothing. ~ Karim Rashid

Much like the fortified wine that gives Marsala its name, this tasteful hue embodies the satisfying richness of a fulfilling meal, while its grounding red-brown roots emanate a sophisticated, natural earthiness. This hearty, yet stylish tone is universally appealing and translates easily to fashion, beauty, industrial design, home furnishings and interiors. ~ Leatrice Eiseman

Lately, even the Waybacklist borrowers seem to be missing. Have they Been seduced by some other book club on the other side of town? Have they all bought Kindles?
I have one, and I use it most nights. I always imagine the books staring and whispering, Traitor! - but come on, I have a lot of free first chapters to get through. My Kindle is a hand-me-down from my dad, one of the original models< ... > There are newer Kindles with bigger screens and subtler industrial design, but this one is like Penumbra's postcards: so uncool it's cool again. ~ Robin Sloan

While I was at community college, I studied industrial design because I thought maybe I'd be an automotive designer - I grew up in Detroit - and I also studied, geology because I was interested in science, a little bit. ~ Andrew J. Feustel

I majored in industrial design/painting, but haven't had time to exercise that creativity. ~ Elisabeth Hasselbeck

We had the hardware expertise, the industrial design expertise and the software expertise, including iTunes. One of the biggest insights we have was that we decided not to try to manage your music library on the iPod, but to manage it in iTunes. Other companies tried to do everything on the device itself and made it so complicated that it was useless. ~ Steve Jobs

Every single item that we come into contact with on a daily basis has been designed by an artist. From the toothbrush we use in the morning, to the defibrillator that could save our lives, an artist is behind the design. ~ Jarrett J. Krosoczka

In order to fix it, you need a passionate anger about something that doesn't work well. ~ James Dyson

It is the nature of intuition to spark and guide creativity, and it's an essential ingredient for anything "new" to happen in the world at all. ~ Maggie Macnab

People tell you the world looks a certain way. Parents tell you how to think. Schools tell you how to think. TV. Religion. And then at a certain point, if you're lucky, you realize you can make up your own mind. Nobody sets the rules but you. You can design your own life. ~ Carrie-Anne Moss

If you go back to 1800, everybody was poor. I mean everybody. The Industrial Revolution kicked in, and a lot of countries benefited, but by no means everyone. ~ Bill Gates

Improving your process won't move you from good to great design. It'll move you from bad to average. ~ Fred Brooks

If you insist on reducing it to its basic elements, it's the sure and simple knowledge that there's something more out there, something greater than yourself, than mankind: a grand plan, a design that can't be comprehended by you or by any other human being, because it is numinous, it is God's design, something only He can fathom. ~ Eric Van Lustbader

Typography fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and integration ~ Neil Postman

I remarked in the original Preface to this Book, that I did not find it easy to get sufficiently far away from it, in the first sensations of having finished it, to refer to it with the composure which this formal heading would seem to require. My interest in it was so recent and strong, and my mind was so divided between pleasure and regret - pleasure in the achievement of a long design, regret in the separation from many companions - that I was in danger of wearying the reader with personal confidences and private emotions. ~ Charles Dickens

Why can't we have those curves and arches that express feeling in design? What is wrong with them? Why has everything got to be vertical, straight, unbending, only at right angles - and functional? ~ Prince Charles

I wouldn't like to live in a castle now, but I'd enjoy a visit to Restormel in Cornwall in its 13th century prime. It's a circular castle with the rooms built against the outer walls and quite intimate in size. Life there wouldn't follow the pattern of more classic castle design. ~ Jo Beverley

Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolution, the first waves of modern invention and the first wave of nuclear power. And this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be part of it-we mean to lead it. ~ John F. Kennedy

Just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing. ~ Guy Debord

There is no "End" to be written, neither can you, like an architect, engrave in stone the day the garden was finished. A painter can frame his picture, a composer can notate his coda, but a garden is always on the move. ~ Mirabel Osler

Visual communication of any kind, whether persuasive or informative, from billboards to birth announcements, should be seen as the embodiment of form and function; the integration of the beautiful and useful." – Paul Rand ~ John Clifford

Intelligent design theorists have learned a few lessons from the failures of their predecessors and have devised a more sophisticated strategy to compete head on with evolution. One of the main things they [intelligent design creationists] have learned is what not to say.
A major element of their strategy is to advance a form of creation that not only omits any explicit mention of Genesis but is also usually vague, if not mute, about any of the specific claims about the nature of Creation, the separate ancestry of humans and apes, the explanation of the earth's geology by catastrophic global flood, or the age of the earth - items that readily identified young-earth creationism as a thinly disguised biblical literalism. ~ Robert T. Pennock

I'm a perfectionist. And that's served me very well in my career. It allows me to handle these large, complex problems without letting things fall through the cracks ... That is the mentality you have to have to attack these complex problems of chip design, for example, when you're overwhelmed with complexity. ~ Henry Samueli

With no small amount of trepidation, we walked alone past a colony of black-faced monkeys we'd been told were extremely dangerous. We avoided eye contact and certainly didn't take pictures. And dearly wished our old Sherpa bag-carrying matey was nearby. We visited Gandhi's tomb. We saw saris being printed and hand-knotted carpets being fabricated and negotiated a decent price for a small hand-crafted rug of Mughal design that, as long as we keep the certificate of authenticity safe, should appreciated in value. We witnessed poverty beyond poverty, with 'untouchables' so poor that they are actually outside the caste system, and who can't even afford to live in the unsanitary slums described as 'unfit for human habitation. ~ Karl Wiggins

My style is kind of eclectic and I don't like to do the same thing over and over again. I like to have fun and explore myself so you won't see the same design. ~ Venus Williams

Reagan filled his inner circle with pro-industry scientists who denied the reality of every environmental ill from acid rain to climate change. And seemingly overnight, banning and tightly regulating harmful industrial practices went from being bipartisan political practice to a symptom of command and control environmentalism. ~ Naomi Klein

Good design can't fix broken business models. ~ Jeffrey Veen

I'm gonna design my own fleet of trailers. No! I'm gonna record an album like Jennifer Lopez. It'll be an acoustic version of K.C. and the Sunshine Band. Then maybe I'll design a line of clothes like Puff Daddy, but all in synthetic fur. ~ Brad Pitt

You have to finish things - that's what you learn from, you learn by finishing things. ~ Neil Gaiman

Character design, like story design, requires a hook to grab the reader's attention. ~ Ted Naifeh

Decisions are the frequent fabric of our daily design. ~ Don Yaeger

Design is a response to a specific problem. You are given a problem to solve, and then you let the problem itself tell you what your solution is. ~ Chip Kidd

When I was a very little boy, I lived underneath the air pattern of LaGuardia airport in New York and I watched the planes fly to their destinations. I was in love with the design of these airplanes. ~ John Travolta

Things that I can do myself, I either do by myself, or teach a willing undergraduate who doesn't know how to do those things by doing it for me. Things that I can't do myself, my graduate students should be doing. ~ John Maeda

If you see something beautiful in someone, speak it. ~ Ruthie Lindsey

Design work doesn't just satisfy requirements, it elicits them. ~ Fred Brooks

Italy is full of historical buildings. And Europe holds a great history of philosophy from Greece until today. I read all those books and see these buildings, and I think of where I stand when I design my architecture. ~ Tadao Ando

After doing some research with my agent, we found out Klipsch was an official Colts partner, and they were based in Indianapolis, which only added to my esteem for the company. I also have a passion for design and technology that developed while I was at Stanford and appreciate the quality of Klipsch's speakers and headphones. ~ Andrew Luck

What several decades of research has revealed about Earth's location within the vastness of the cosmos can be summed up in this statement: the ideal place for any kind of life as we know it turns out to be a solar system like ours, within a galaxy like the Milky Way, within a supercluster of galaxies like the Virgo supercluster, within a super-supercluster like the Laniakea super-supercluser. In other words we happen to live in the best, perhaps the one and only, neighborhood that allows not only for physical life's existence but also for it's enduring survival. ~ Hugh Ross

I believe in human liberty as I believe in the wine of life. There is no salvation for men in the pitiful condescension of industrial masters. Guardians have no place in a land of freemen. ~ Woodrow Wilson

Of valid economics pre-dating the Power Age (steam and electricity), there remains not a vestige. Of valid economics pre-dating the intensive and extensive use of electricity there will soon exist only rags and tatters. We still have to thank Adam Smith for insisting 'Consumption is the sole end and purpose of production;' but the old form of the law of demand and supply is outmoded, since supply has become practically inexhaustible. ~ Harriet Boyd Hawes

As soon as enough people in contemporary societies progress beyond adolescence, the entire consumer-driven economy and egocentric lifestyle will implode. The adolescent society is actually quite unstable due to its incongruence with the primary patterns of living systems. The industrial growth society is simply incompatible with collective human maturity. No true adult wants to be a consumer, worker bee, or tycoon, or a soldier in an imperial war, and none would go through these motions if there were other options at hand. The enlivened soul and wild nature are deadly to industrial growth economies - and vice versa. ~ Bill Plotkin

In choosing a colour one must realize that it changes in different aspects. ~ Nancy Lancaster

(invitation to a beheading) "In spite of everything I loved you, and will go on loving you-on my knees, with my shoulders drawn back, showing my heels to the headsman and straining my goose neck-even then. And afterwards-perhaps most of all afterwards-I shall love you, and one day we shall have a real, all-embracing explanation, and then perhaps we shall somehow fit together, you and I...we shall connect the points...and you and I shall form that unique design for which I yearn."--pg329 ~ Michelle Hodkin

No sane creator, setting out from scratch to design a flat-fish, would have conceived on his drawing board the absurd distortion of the head needed to bring both eyes round to one side. ~ Richard Dawkins

In the art of design, color is to form what verse is to prose,
a more harmonious and luminous vehicle of the thought. ~ Anna Brownell Jameson

Nationalisation ... does not in itself engender greater equality, more jobs in the regions, higher investment or industrial democracy. The public knows this perfectly well, and so do the workers who have suffered from pit closures, steel redundancies and the run-down of the railways. It is idiotic to try to bamboozle them. ~ Anthony Crosland

The faults of a man loved or honoured sometimes steal secretly and imperceptibly upon the wise and virtuous, but by injudicious fondness or thoughtless vanity are adopted with design. ~ Samuel Johnson

[A]t least since the late nineteenth century when the primary role in categorising sexual behaviour and naming what is 'normal' and what is 'perverse' passed, in most industrial societies, from the religious to the medical and scientific professions, we have lived with the notion of distinct categories of people labelled 'homosexual' and 'heterosexual'. (The category 'homosexual' was coined by the Viennese writer Karol Benkert in 1869, 'heterosexual' emerging somewhat later.) Since that time, new discourses have tried to establish the male 'homosexual' as a distinct type of person - as opposed to same-sex attraction or same-sex acts being seen as a potential in everyone. As Peter Tatchell ['It's Just a Phase: Why Homosexuality is Doomed', in Simpson (ed.), Anti-Gay, London: Cassell. 1996] puts it, 'prior to that time … there were only homosexual acts, not homosexual people … [For] the medieval Catholic Church … homosexuality was not … the special sin of a unique class of people but a dangerous temptation to which any mortal might succumb. This doctrine implicitly conceded the attractiveness of same-sex desire, and unwittingly acknowledged its pervasive, universal potential ~ Richard Dunphy

A bleak, black book, it engenders awe and despair. I have read it in its entirety 4 1/2 times, each time finding its resonance and beauty so great as to demand another reading. As I read, I found myself devastated by the thoroughness of the book's annihilating sensibility and revived by the beauty of its language, the complexity of its design, the melancholy, horror and stoic sympathy in its rendering of what we used to call the human condition. ~ Michael Silverblatt