Marcel Wanders Quotes

Good design is making something intelligible and memorable. Great design is making something memorable and meaningful.

Good design to me is both appearance and functionality together. It's the experience that makes it good design.

Design must be functional, and functionality must be translated into visual aesthetics without any reliance on gimmicks that have to be explained.

I think that the point of being an architect is to help raise the experience of everyday living, even a little. Putting a window where people would really like one. Making sure a shaving mirror in a hotel bathroom is at the right angle. Making bureaucratic buildings that are somehow cheerful.

So much of design is context.

If you don't have an emotionally engaging design for a device, no one will care about it.

Design must reflect the practical and aesthetic in business but above all... good design must primarily serve people.

The difference between good design and great design is intelligence.

When I design, I think about the desire someone might have for it and why. I want them to fall in love with it.

Every other piece of industrial design is a pot or a dish or something insignificant. But when you have a chair, it's like a sculpture of a person: it's alive. It's big. You can't miss it. It's a 'look at me!' item.

I think it's really important to design things with a kind of personality.

There's a fundamental problem with how the software business does things. We're asking people who are masters of hard-edged technology to design the soft, human side of software as well. As a result, they make products that are really cool - if you happen to be a software engineer.

The design of the Mac wasn't what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it's all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it.

To design is much more than simply to assemble, to order, or even to edit: it is to add value and meaning, to illuminate, to simplify, to clarify, to modify, to dignify, to dramatize, to persuade, and perhaps even to amuse. To design is to transform prose into poetry.

There is a powerful need for symbolism, and that means the architecture must have something that appeals to the human heart. There is a powerful need for symbolism, and that means the architecture must have something that appeals to the human heart.

I don't think I'm an artist or that I'm doing anything superintellectual. What's important to me is to get a visceral reaction from people, for them to want that coat because they think it's beautiful.

All those involved in the construction of an architectural design, from the architect to the builder, have an attachment to the architecture, although it's difficult to quantify the attachment.

I don't eschew autobiographical writing, but I'm not interested in mine to be so straightforward. The things that tend to move me the most are often those that I have to figure out its meaning for myself. The human being's ability to make a metaphor to describe a human experience is just really cool.

Writing and reading fiction is, I think, a human effort to make sense of the world.

In architecture the idea degenerated. Design allows a more direct and pleasurable route.

Design should be easy in the sense that every step should be obviously and clearly identifiable. Simplify elements to make change simple so you can manage the technical risk.

Things that are ultimately complex must have a simple end user experience if they are to be successful.

For much of its existence, design was all about convenience. We wanted to hide technology so that users are not distracted into thinking about the tools they use.

I'm a big believer in the emotion of design, and the message that's sent before somebody begins to read, before they get the rest of the information; what is the emotional response they get to the product, to the story, to the painting - whatever it is.

'Commercial' is not the word that has to be said only by CEOs. It has to be something that is maybe the essence of design, because design has some sort of art in it and creation, but it's also some object that you have to use. There is also this pragmatic end to it.