Quotes About Design

markets in goods and services for immediate consumption – haircuts and hamburgers – work so well that it is hard to design them so they fail to deliver efficiency and innovation; while markets in assets are so automatically prone to bubbles and crashes that it is hard to design them so they work at all.

Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software (Addison-Wesley Professional, 1995) by

In order to be as effective as possible, we need to consciously design our teams rather than merely allow them to form accidentally or haphazardly.

These houses had been plunked down with an alarming randomness -- unevenly spaced, on crooked lines, like whoever had designed the place had said, We'll just follow this cat, and wherever he sits down, we'll build something.

An architect requires a great many men to erect his building. But he does not ask them to vote on his design.

He slipped the sketch to the bottom of the pile. "Architecture is primarily a utilitarian conception, and the problem is to elevate the principle of pragmatism into the realm of esthetic abstraction. All else is nonsense.

My mother reinforced this affinity for the natural world. In the grandeur of its design—the skeleton of a leaf, the labors of an ant colony, the glow of a bleach-white moon—she experienced the wonder and humility that others reserved for religious worship, and in our youth, she'd lectured Maya and me about the damage humans could inflict when they were careless in building cities or drilling oil or throwing away garbage.

hat with a rolled brim, a short cloak

Robert Adam was the great architect of the eighteenth century, Emma. He built many grand and beautiful

Don't just download the latest app, help redesign it. Don't just play on your phone, program it.

We "design" human nature, by designing the institutions within which people live. So we must ask ourselves just what kind of a human nature we want to help design.

If we design workplaces that permit people to find meaning in their work, we will be designing a human nature that values work

Unlike procedural programming, which emphasizes algorithms, OOP emphasizes the data. Rather than try to fit a problem to the procedural approach of a language, OOP attempts to fit the language to the problem. The idea is to design data forms that correspond to the essential features of a problem.

We are either the second creation of our own proactive design, or we are the second creation of other people's agendas, of circumstances, or of past habits.

Begin with the end in mind" is based on the principle that all things are created twice. There's a mental or first creation, and a physical or second creation, to all things.

Because I am self-aware, because I have imagination and conscience, I can examine my deepest values. I can realize that the script I'm living is not in harmony with those values, that my life is not the product of my own proactive design, but the result of the first creation I have deferred to circumstances and other people.

YOUR LIFE DOESN'T JUST "HAPPEN." Whether you know it or not, it is carefully designed by you—or carelessly designed by you.

Whether we are aware of it or not, whether we are in control of it or not, there is a first creation to every part of our lives. We are either the second creation of our own proactive design, or we are the second creation of other people's agendas, of circumstances, or of past habits.

process produces happiness, "the object and design of our existence." Happiness can be defined, in part at least, as the fruit of the desire and ability to sacrifice what we want now for what we want eventually.

One way to look at design—any kind of design—is that it's essentially about constraints (things you have to do and things you can't do) and tradeoffs (the less-than-ideal choices you make to live within the constraints).

What works is good, integrated design that fills a need—carefully thought out, well executed, and tested.

Clear, well-thought-out navigation is one of the best opportunities a site has to create a good impression.

Another needless source of question marks over people's heads is links and buttons that aren't obviously clickable. As a user, I should never have to devote a millisecond of thought to whether things are clickable—or not.

Making every page or screen self-evident is like having good lighting in a store: it just makes everything seem better.