Quotes from Ralph Caplan

Thinking about design is hard, but not thinking about it can be disastrous.

A chair is the first thing you need when you don't really need anything, and is therefore a peculiarly compelling symbol of civilization. For it is civilization, not survival, that requires design.

Attention must be paid' is the cardinal rule of design discipline, for the designer is above all someone who pays attention to the situation at hand.

All our media are given over to things that are better left unsaid.

We are … the un-proud non-possessors of objects whose chief substance is that of the transient symbol. Our Puritan fear of the love of things turns out to have been groundless after all, for we do not love things or even possess them: they pass through our lives as barium passes through the digestive tract, unassimilated, their function merely to flash signals along the way.

If more designers had bad backs, we would have more good chairs.

Designers shouldn't design for museums any more than mummies should die for them.

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.

Nothing is more to the point than a good digression.

For the very nature of the product designer's role in industry tends to militate against his effectiveness. He is schooled--and presumably motivated--to design things for people; but he is retained to design things for the market.

Museums, whatever their content, are logical design arenas. Their renewed vitality reflects a spreading curatorial perception that a museum is a designed situation more than it is a warehouse open to the public. This in turn has made it possible for a great many people, including children, to perceive museum-going as something to do, rather than something that is done to you.

The experience of riding in a subway or elevator calls to mind Bertrand Russell's remark that much of modern anxiety stems from the time we spend in unnatural proximity to strangers without the preliminary sniffing that is instinctive in animals, including us.

We should plead not guilty by reason of inanity…

As I indicated, I do not believe that any chair, however elegant, contributes significantly to life or solves problems that can be considered major by anyone who is not minor.

Thinking about design is hard, but not thinking about it can be disastrous.

Designers shouldn't design for museums any more than mummies should die for them.

All our media are given over to things that are better left unsaid.

Attention must be paid' is the cardinal rule of design discipline, for the designer is above all someone who pays attention to the situation at hand.

A chair is the first thing you need when you don't really need anything, and is therefore a peculiarly compelling symbol of civilization. For it is civilization, not survival, that requires design.