Quotes About Progress

The meanings of today may not be the meanings of the future.

Could we ever switch to this or any of the many other rational systems? Unlikely: tradition is difficult to overcome.

Some things can only be solved by massive cultural changes, which probably means they will never be solved.

With the passage of time, the psychology of people stays the same, but the tools and objects in the world change.

We have become dependent upon our technologies to navigate the world, to hold intelligent conversation, to write intelligently, and to remember.

One way of overcoming the fear of the new is to make it look like the old. This practice is decried by design purists, but in fact, it has its benefits in easing the transition from the old to the new. It

If designers and researchers do not sometimes fail, it is a sign that they are not trying hard enough—they are not thinking the great creative thoughts that will provide breakthroughs in how we do things.

day a product development process starts, it is behind schedule and above budget.

When a new way of doing things is vastly superior to another, then the merits of change outweigh the difficulty of change. Just because something is different does not mean it is bad. If we only kept to the old, we could never improve.

We need to remove the word failure from our vocabulary, replacing it instead with learning experience. To fail is to learn: we learn more from our failures than from our successes. With success, sure, we are pleased, but we often have no idea why we succeeded. With failure, it is often possible to figure out why, to ensure that it will never happen again.

We need to remove the word failure from our vocabulary, replacing it instead with learning experience. To fail is to learn: we learn more from our failures than from our successes.

Predicting technology is relatively easy compared to predictions of human behavior, or in this case, the adoption of societal conventions. Will this prediction be true? You

People invariably object and complain whenever a new approach is introduced into an existing array of products and systems. Conventions are violated: new learning is required. The merits of the new system are irrelevant: it is the change that is upsetting.

la paradoja de la tecnología: por lo general, una mayor capacidad funcional se ha de pagar con una mayor complejidad.

the impact of competitive forces that drive the introduction of extra features, often to excess: the cause of the disease dubbed "featuritis," whose major symptom is "creeping featurism.

Even if the first versions of a product are well done, human-centered, and focused upon real needs, it is the rare organization that is content to let a good product stay untouched.

Cultural constraints are likely to change with time.

With open-source software, inexpensive open-source 3-D printers, and even open-source education, we can transform the world.

Machines are braver than art.

Well, what shall I do next? What is the next thing demanded of me by history?

Our becoming is done.

We should continually be striving to transform every art into a science: in the process, we advance the art.

Feedback is several orders of magnitude more important in product development than it is in manufacturing.

When I was sixteen I read ten books a week: E.E. Cummings, William Faulkner, Henry James, Hart Crane, John Steinbeck. I thought I progressed in literature by reading faster and faster--but reading more is reading less. I learned to slow down.