Quotes About Design

I said early on in this chapter that we would need 144 relays for our adding machine. Here's how I figured that out: Each

a digital design engineer, you would spend long hours going through the TTL Data Book familiarizing yourself with the types of TTL chips that were available. Once you knew all your tools, you could actually build the computer I showed in Chapter 17 out of TTL chips. Wiring the chips together is a lot easier than wiring individual transistors

We can laugh all we like at Micromaniacs, but they will have the last laugh - because they are designing the future that the rest of us will have to live in.

I cannot look at the universe as the result of blind chance, yet I can see no evidence of beneficent design, or indeed of design of any kind, in the details.

I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world.

We use committees for all the ulterior purposes for which they might have been designed: diffusion of executive responsibility, plausible deniability, misdirection, providing the appearance of activity without the substance, and protecting the guilty.

In fact it [Venturi's design] is best described not simply as a response to the program but as a response to the reality behind the program.

The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing.

I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.

The cottage garden most for use designed, Yet not of beauty destitute.

At no point, anywhere in Seattle, is there a clear and obvious route to an interstate. And, if you find yourself magically right beside an interstate on-ramp, you can safely assume that it's leading the wrong direction. You might say to yourself, "Self, if I've found the on-ramp going this direction, surely the on-ramp going the other direction must be right nearby!" But you'd be wrong. This place was designed by crack addicts, I'm convinced of it.

It would probably be uncharitable to call the look "neoclassical Georgian plus IBM taupe and gingerbread revival meeting in a dark alley for fisticuffs and insults." But there I go anyway. It wasn't my kind of joint. I

If God hired an architect to design heaven, this was how it would be done.

Throughout the night he spun a thread... Each radius exactly drawn With trellised filaments between, And over all bright diamonds shone; In meshed and tenuous design It was a fragile, wayside sonnet— The maker, heedless of acclaim, Had left no signature upon it.

Tattoos are walking artwork.

You think it, I ink it.

Good design for the home should be universal. A house should be like old shoes, comfortable, like a good friend… The Japanese aesthetic is important to me. Very organic. They have a sense of the weight of the thing: very balanced.

Design is a way of life, a point of view. It involves the whole complex of visual communications: talent, creative ability, manual skill, and technical knowledge. Aesthetics and economics, technology and psychology are intrinsically related to the process.

However, if everyone were really only out to advance his own interest, the world would have already ground to a halt, as there would be so much cheating in trading and slacking in production. More importantly, if we design our economic system based on such an assumption, the result is likely to be lower, rather than higher, efficiency.

The men found one mine—also Russian-made—that had a particularly diabolical design. A dozen ships could pass over it without incident, but the thirteenth ship would cause it to detonate. "It took a curious sort of mind to come up with a notion like that," wrote one Marine, wondering if the number thirteen had a "sinister connotation for Russians as it did in the States.

Some guitarists think of the USA as the only source of quality electric guitars, and for the most part they are correct. However, there are many of us who remember the superb range of guitars designed and made by BURNS GUITARS, a British company.

The trouble with traffic engineers is that when there's a problem with a road, they always try to add something. To my mind, it's much better to remove things.

The experience of birth is vast. It is a diverse tapestry woven by cultural customs, shaped in personal choices, affected by biological factors, marked by political circumstances. Yet the nature of birth itself prevails in elegant design of simple complexity.

The urge for good design is the same as the urge to go on living.