Jesse James Garrett Quotes

The design industry is really pathetic.

At Stanford, we teach 'design thinking' - that is, we put together small, interdisciplinary groups to figure out what the true needs are and then to apply the art of engineering to serve them.

Recognizing the need is the primary condition for design.

Integrating breakthrough technology into everyday products is always a challenge; at the same time, this is exactly how design makes tech products easily adoptable in life.

I ended up going to do a matches program at the state for industrial design. And from there, I got hired at IDEO to joint their design team there - and basically, you are starting as an industrial designer to design products - and then kept asking the question, 'What else can design accomplish? What else can design do?'

Designers are by nature more inquisitive, more connected. They dig a little deeper in terms of insights. They turn those insights into innovation. That connection to the consumer is absolutely critical in driving innovation. It’s critical that design isn’t subjugated to the back room as a short order cook for marketing or for merchandising or sales. It has to be up front.

A powerful tool in the early stages of developing scenarios is to pretend the interface is magic. If your persona has goals and the product has magical powers to meet them, how simple could the interaction be? This kind of thinking is useful to help designers look outside the box.

Good design is good business.

What I love about design is the artistic and scientific complexity that also becomes useful . . . Great designers also pursue a mission. Great designers design with mankind in mind . . . The crossroads of science and art, innovation and inspiration are what I love about design.

Design is a response to a specific problem. You are given a problem to solve, and then you let the problem itself tell you what your solution is.

Design has to work. Art does not.

Design must be an innovative, highly creative, cross-disciplinary tool responsive to the needs of men. It must be more research-oriented, and we must stop defiling the earth itself with poorly-designed objects and structures.

User experience is everything. It always has been, but it's undervalued and underinvested in. If you don't know user-centered design, study it. Hire people who know it. Obsess over it. Live and breathe it. Get your whole company on board.

We have lots to learn in India when it comes to design, and that includes me! I'm constantly learning; that never stops.

The nature of design is to synthesize disparate perspectives and create a richer end product through collaboration and iteration.

Design is a solution to a problem. Art is a question to a problem.

We have always thought about design as being so much more than just the way something looks. It's the whole thing: the way something works on so many different levels. Ultimately, of course, design defines so much of our experience.

You can't exceed the system with language. You can only exceed the system with events; recommended procedures that are better. You can't exceed the system by telling people to be good, be kind, be considerate... You have to take away the conditions that makes it necessary for you to be kind. And to be kind, you design highways that aren't slippery; where no accidents, or less accidents, occur. In the future, everybody becomes an innovator - a creator.

When you're designing and inventing the way I did, every minute of your life is put - every neuron in your brain into trying to think about the little code and how you can maybe have one less line of code and a little bit more straightforward from the beginning to the answer. And you don't have time to think about companies and products and how would I build this. So Steve Jobs and I were a very necessary pair.

Design, in its broadest sense, is the enabler of the digital era.

We still seek to solve conflicts with 'judgement' instead of designing the way forwards.

If you weren’t an optimist, it would be impossible to be an architect.

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.

Think about the market, think about the design, and think about who is going to design for that market. Hit the mark.

The design is done when the problem goes away.