Helmut Jahn Quotes

Architects often have a mindset where you solve a problem, so you have a set of needs that you have to address. Often I feel that my projects have to have concrete applications.

Health care is a design problem. Dependence on foreign oil is a design problem. To some extent, poverty is a design problem. We need design thinkers to solve those problems, and most people who are in positions of political power are not design thinkers, to put it mildly.

I'm not a scientist. What I find interesting about my work is how, as a designer, I sit between science and the consumer and can see both a need and a solution.

Architecture and building is about how you get around the obstacles that are presented to you. That sometimes determines how successful you'll be: How good are you at going around obstacles?

I think Isambard Kingdom Brunel would be a good chap to have supper with. Anyone who builds a railway and then builds a steamship when he gets to Bristol and can't go any further must be a good chap.

Good questions outrank easy answers.

But I'm a big believer that government does not have a monopoly on good ideas.

Our economy is built upon convergent thinkers, people that execute things, get them done. But artists and designers are divergent thinkers: they expand the horizon of possibilities.

I want students to understand specific technologies, but the real goal is that they should be able to reason about how systems work and be intelligently skeptical about technology so that, when they're running the world in a few years, they'll do a good job.

If you wait for customers to tell you that you need to do something, you're too late. Good business leaders should be half a step ahead of what customers want, i.e. they don't actually quite know they want it. That's what innovation's about. With Plan A, we didn't wait for the consumers to tell us.

It's always the organizations that are resource constrained that come up with the good ideas to win.

You look at the world around you, and you take it apart into all its components. Then you take some of those components, throw them away, and plug in different ones, start it up and see what happens.

As engineers, we were going to be in a position to change the world - not just study it.

Anytime you put a challenge out there, people come up with a creative solution on the software side.

Technologists come at a problem from the point of view that the system is working a certain way, and if I engage in that system and actually change the rules of the system, I can make it work a different way.

If you give a hacker a new toy, the first thing he'll do is take it apart to figure out how it works.

Intellectuals are good at seeing the big picture. But they are not so good at process.

Often the most important moment in the design process is figuring out what the right question is.

I'm always good at seeing five, ten steps ahead. Like, really thinking ahead, you know? Reverse engineering, whatever it is, you know.

Part of the process is always, 'Is there a better way?' We try to think through if there's something we can do better creatively or technically, or just is more efficient.

If you've got good systemising skills you can apply them to systems you aren't familiar with, and look for patterns.

I never pick up an item without thinking of how I might improve it.

Engineering is the closest thing to magic that exists in the world.

To the engineer falls the job of clothing the bare bones of science with life, comfort, and hope.

I am enthusiastic over humanity’s extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuity. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem.