Quotes About Insight

Designers are not users.

The architect who really designs for a human being has to know a great deal more than just the Five Canons of Vitruvius.

The essence of design... lies in the process of discovering a problem shared by many people and trying to solve it.

Theory can blind observation.

An expert is someone who tells you why you can't do something.

Creativity is to think more efficiently.

In all situations where bad design decisions were made, people lacked some information that would have helped them make the right decision.

The best design reveals itself during a long fatiguing process of digging into the subconscious.

Typography is to literature as musical performance is to composition: an essential act of interpretation, full of endless opportunities for insight or obtuseness.

The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value

We don't do focus groups - that is the job of the designer. It's unfair to ask people who don't have a sense of the opportunities of tomorrow from the context of today to design.

Steve [Jobs'] brilliance is his ability to see something and then understand it and then figure out how to put it into the context of his design methodology - everything is design.

Customers can't always tell you what they want, but they can always tell you what's wrong.

The boundaries of design are the same as the problem of perception.

The genius is a genius by the first look he casts on any object. Is his eye creative? Does he not rest in angles and colors, but beholds the design,--he will presently undervalue the actual object.

The heart knows today what the mind will learn tomorrow.

We don't do focus groups - that is the job of the designer.

If you don't talk to your customers, how will you know how to talk to your customers?

When you feel the architecture just click, as though it couldn't have been anything else, it's due to a true understanding of the site and the plan and section.

If the statistics are boring, then you've got the wrong numbers.

I've learnt something from every failure. The products I helped design at the first two companies I worked for were utter failures. But now I know why.

It is not enough to demand insight and informative images of reality from the theater. Our theater must stimulate a desire for understanding, a delight in changing reality.

Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul.

The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data.