Mark Parker Quotes

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

Iteration, not ideation, is the most important part of early stage entrepreneurship. You have to have a lot of ideas - a lot of bad ideas - if you want to end up with a good one.

Sometimes I do that quite a lot, go back and forth a lot between ideas. Try things out.

Isn't the drawing board the place where all the best work happens? It's not a bad thing to go back there. It's the entire point.

I enjoy creating new ideas, working on new creative projects.

I like working intensely, then going away and thinking about it, working out why it didn't work and then coming back to it. It makes the work richer, I think.

Usually, if you have a new idea, you very rarely break through to anything like recognizable development or implementation of that idea the first time around - it takes two or three goes for the research community to return to the topic.

Well, what I try to do is throw as much mud on the wall as I possibly can and just see what sticks, what shines as quirky or more interesting that the others, and I try to cling onto that one, somehow join a link from there to there.

Design is nothing if not decision making.

I'm always thinking about whatever game I'm working on. My brain works subconsciously on design pretty much every hour I'm awake.

Recognizing the need is the primary condition for design.

Creating something is all about problem-solving.

We very much use a prototyping model, play with ideas, and then get stuff started that way, which is how the greatest projects get started.

At the start of the process the idea is just a thought - very fragile and exclusive. When the first physical manifestation is created everything changes. It is no longer exclusive, now it involves a lot of people.

Ideas must be put to the test. That's why we make things, otherwise they would be no more than ideas. There is often a huge difference between an idea and its realisation. I've had what I thought were great ideas that just didn't work.

Nothing is invented and perfected at the same time.

I move very slowly. It's usually material first. I sit with the material for a long time.

Most intuitive ideas have to be clarified, so there is a trial and error process.

Good and bad ideas both come from the same fountain of speculation and experiment.

Having an idea is easy, courting one can be difficult.

Creativity has to start somewhere, and we are true believers in the power of bracing, candid feedback, and the iterative process - reworking, reworking, and reworking again until a flawed story finds its through line or a hollow character finds its soul.

A lot of what we do in the studio on a day-to-day basis is you try to cast a line as far out as you can out into unknown waters and reel it back in, cut out stuff that isn't working, cut out stuff that isn't connecting to people.

Design, refine and repeat, and keep learning all the way along. It sounds bland and pedestrian, but in fact, it's the reverse.

Failing is part of my process. A new bit never works the first time. I figure I have to bomb 7 times to make it good. So I tweak it.

Designing is always on the mind of a designer, and as I was saying it's a sort of digestive process, so I usually keep it to myself unless I'm collaborating with someone because explaining all the things that are going on in your head can be quite exhausting, especially in the early stages of a project.