Quotes About Design

Although well meant, many things that are designed just to be general purpose often end up satisfying no purpose. Software components should, first and foremost, be designed for use and to fulfill that use well. Effective generality comes from understanding, and understanding leads to simplification.

I know, there really is an ?i' in architecture. But it's not a capital ?I', calling attention to itself, dominating discussion. The lower-case character fits neatly within the word. Its there only because it fulfills requirements for proper spelling and pronunciation.

You don't drive the architecture, the requirements do. You do your best to serve their needs.

Like Janus, a software architect needs to be a keeper of doors and passageways, spanning the old and the new, incorporating creativity with sound engineering to fulfill todays requirements while planning to meet tomorrow's expectations.

Design is a discovery process, as we implement we discover new information, often impossible to know up front. By accepting that design is an ongoing and empirical process in a forever changing world, we learn that the design process must be flexible and ongoing too. Clinging onto your original designs and trying to force them through is only going to end up with one result so you need to learn to understand that it will never look like that.

As you work in requirements meetings to design software, pretend that your customer is not your customer. It turns out that this is a very easy thing to do, because it is true. Your customer is not your customer. Your customer's customer is your customer. If your customer's customer wins, your customer wins. Which means you win.

Many software projects get software architects involved only in the design phase, then they move to other projects or the consultation contract ends. How can they ensure that their deliberate architectural decisions have been implemented correctly? Their decisions will be at best good intentions unless they follow-through with them.

All architecture is design but not all design is architecture. Architecture represents the significant design decisions that shape a system, where significant is measured by cost of change. (Grady Booch)

As a developer you rarely get the time to sit back and really look at how the whole system fits together. As an architect, this is your main focus. While developers are furiously building classes, methods, tests, user interfaces and databases, you should be making sure that all those pieces work well together.

Once you accept that failures will happen, you have the ability to design your system's reaction to specific failures. Just as auto engineers create crumple zones---areas designed to protect passengers by failing first---you can create safe failure modes that contain the damage and protect the rest of the system.

Software development is fundamentally a design activity, in that it involves an ongoing process of decision making until the developed system goes into production.

If you cannot grok the overall structure of a program while taking a shower, e.g., with no external memory aids, you are not ready to code it.

I write the way you might arrange flowers. Not every try works, but each one launches another. Every constraint, even dullness, frees up a new design.

Form follows profit is the aesthetic principle of our times.

Architecture is about public space held by buildings.

My passion and great enjoyment for architecture, and the reason the older I get the more I enjoy it, is because I believe we - architects - can effect the quality of life of the people.

I believe very strongly, and have fought since many years ago - at least over 30 years ago - to get architecture not just within schools, but architecture talked about under history, geography, science, technology, art.

The most beautiful things in the world," Ford said a quarter century later, "are those from which all excess weight has been eliminated." The car he was working on would weigh five hundred pounds.

It is to be noted that when any part of this paper appears dull there is a design in it.

We were created to live in community. We are designed by God for relationships.

Toda la evidencia disponible en las ciencias biológicas apoya una propuesta principal … que el cosmos es un todo especialmente diseñado con formas de vida y que el ser humano es su razón y meta fundamental, un todo en el cual todas las facetas de la realidad tienen su sentido y explicación en este hecho central».

She understood heaven to be about partnering with God to make a new and better world, one with increasingly complex and expansive expressions and dimensions of shalom, creativity, beauty, and design.

Abstract design is all right—for wallpaper or linoleum. But art is the process of evoking pity or terror, which is not abstract at all but very human.

Functional organization. How does one design an electric motor? Would you attach a bathtub to it, simply because one was available? Would a bouquet of flowers help? A heap of rocks? No, you would use just those elements necessary to its purpose and make it no larger than needed - and you would incorporate safety factors. Function controls design. So it is with revolution.