Victor Papanek Quotes

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?'

The future of design is a future where anything material in the environment - whether it's wearables, cars, buildings - can be designed with this variation of properties and relationship with the environment that can take part in the natural ecology.

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.

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.

A good designer can create a design that accommodates all the constraints and still delivers an elegant, satisfying experience to the user. A great designer can go beyond this and create a design that demonstrates that some of those constraints weren’t really there to begin with.

I not only enjoy it, I think, how do you design things that are applicable to life - unless you live it?

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.

A building that has great environmental responsibility is a political animal in a way because it becomes promotional of a cause. I think that kind of advocacy through architecture is really good.

The main tenet of design thinking is empathy for the people you're trying to design for. Leadership is exactly the same thing - building empathy for the people that you're entrusted to help.

Designs are increasingly winning competitions because they are literally green, and because somewhere they feature a small windmill.

Design needs a new relationship with the world, one that is more focused on our planet's needs.

Over the past 20 years, I have noticed that the most flexible, dynamic, inquisitive minds among my students have been industrial design majors. Industrial designers are bracingly free of ideology and cant. The industrial designer is trained to be a clear-eyed observer of the commercial world - which, like it or not, is modern reality.

The best design work is really done when you spend more time with people, when you have the opportunity to be of the same mindset and the same incentives as the founder of the business.

What is design? It's where you stand with a foot in two worlds - the world of technology and the world of people and human purposes - and you try to bring the two together.

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.

Design shouldn't have to take a backseat to sustainability and making things responsibly.

I am passionate about what design can do - how far it can support the new ideas and the new ways of living of this 21st Century. Good design accelerates this exciting future where manufacturing is local, materials and processes are cradle to cradle, business models are both socially and financially driven.

Fuseproject was founded in 1999, and the notion behind it, which is alive and kicking today, is fusing different disciplines. Our teams are absolutely incredible at their own discipline, but most importantly, they're incredible at partnering with each other.

Designers must be increasingly sensitive to our Earth's dwindling resources. It is our responsibility.

I want to reiterate the fact that at the core of it all, I am a designer, a creator, and as a creative person, I will choose to be limitless in the extension models of my various ideas on design.

A great dream of mine would be to run a design studio full of scientists who think about science as creatively as if they were doing art.

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

In the end, it's clear that the incorporation of synthetic biology in product and architectural design will enable the transition from designs that are inspired by nature to designs made with and by nature to, possibly, designing nature herself.