Katie Hafner Quotes

Everyone wants an iPhone, but it would be impossible to design an iPhone in China because it's not a product; it's an understanding of human nature.

Everything at Apple can be best understood through the lens of designing. Whether it's designing the look and feel of the user experience, or the industrial design, or the system design, and even things like how the boards were laid out.

Every single item that we come into contact with on a daily basis has been designed by an artist. From the toothbrush we use in the morning, to the defibrillator that could save our lives, an artist is behind the design.

At the most basic level, prioritizing design also represents a practical consideration. It's far easier to design first and engineer later.

So I went for engineering, specifically product design, which I enjoyed.

There's so many ways of making product design easier, more efficient, quicker. People are now taking DNA from cows and growing leather. The implications of that, in what it has from a grain standpoint, are enormous.

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?'

I came up with the Enveloper when I was 20 and it took my dad and me several months to develop the initial concept into a working model.

Nature without learning is like a blind man; learning without Nature, like a maimed one; practice without both, incomplete. As in agriculture a good soil is first sought for, then a skilful husbandman, and then good seed; in the same way nature corresponds to the soil, the teacher to the husbandman, precepts and instruction to the seed.

There's more learning than is taught in books.

We're very genuinely designing the best products that we can for people.

Define what the product will do before you design how the product will do it.

Really great products, like @nest, have #design baked in from the beginning instead of slapped on at the end.

We don't do focus groups - that is the job of the designer.

Collectively with my design team we spent time working on the feel, fit and style to ensure the product is not only something I would wear but one which I would be proud to put my name to. I always want to challenge myself and this was such a rewarding experience for me. I'm very happy with the end result and I hope H&M's male customers will be as excited as I am.

I've been putting together the story with Rob and putting all the details of it together and looking at all the various designs they have for the toys and stuff, it's pretty exciting.

Knowledge is honestly everything. It's not just books and staying behind a desk and having a diploma. There's also traveling and knowledge about people, and what I do and scripts and books.

Life is a beta. Voltaire said that the perfect is the enemy of the good. Google lives the rule as it introduces every new product as a beta. That is Google's way to say that it trusts us to help it finish its products. It is Google's way to open up its design process to our wisdom.

The point is that whatever one is trying to learn, it is necessary to have firsthand experience, rather than learning from books or from teachers or by merely conforming to an already established pattern.

In England, more than in any other country, science is felt rather than thought. ... A defect of the English is their almost complete lack of systematic thinking. Science to them consists of a number of successful raids into the unknown.

Our great mistake in education is ... the worship of book-learning-the confusion of instruction and education. We strain the memory instead of cultivating the mind. ... We ought to follow exactly the opposite course with children-to give them a wholesome variety of mental food, and endeavour to cultivate their tastes, rather than to fill their minds with dry facts.

The work of art is born of the intelligence's refusal to reason the concrete. It marks the triumph of the carnal.

If you're a marketer who doesn't know how to invent, design, influence, adapt, and ultimately discard products, then you're no longer a marketer. You're deadwood.

Market-driven design builds the success of the product's marketing into the product itself.

Attractive things work better.