Michael Graves Quotes

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works.

We try to develop products that seem somehow inevitable, that leave you with the sense that that's the only possible solution that makes sense.

Designers have been uncreative and very arrogant. They need to listen to people. People have always wanted more exciting, interesting design, but we designers didn't see it.

I have sometimes thought the power of computers had exceeded our ability to use them, but Mr. Jobs and his team kept giving us devices that made indispensable things easier in ways you never thought of.

If people keep buying poorly designed products, manufacturers and designers will think they are doing the right thing and continue as usual.

A product needs to be sufficiently innovative to distinguish itself from the pack, but not so forward thinking as to alienate the user.

It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.

Porsche's and Apple's design philosophies are similar. Much like the 356, the original iPhone was about defining a foundation for the future.

Socialcam shares Autodesk's mission of helping everybody imagine, design, and create a better world.

I love to see technology from a design perspective and vice versa. I am a 'Desigineer.'

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

You can't move the sun, and you can't even move the tracks, so you have to do something else to better light the engines.

A powerful tool in the early stages of developing scenarios is to pretend the interface is magic. If your persona has goals and the product has magical powers to meet them, how simple could the interaction be? This kind of thinking is useful to help designers look outside the box.

There is a creative solution to every problem. Every possibility holds the promise of abundance.

Customers want new functionality, but they don't want the traditional complexity that has marred products in the past.

The iPod is a perfect example of Steve's [Jobs] methodology of starting with the user and looking at the entire end-to-end system.

It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them. As Henry Ford said many years earlier: "If I had listened to my customers, I would have built a faster horse." Inventions in general express Shannon entropy. They come from the supply side.

In great teams, conflict becomes productive. The free flow of conflicting ideas is critical for creative thinking, for discovering new solutions no one individual would have come to on his own.

Windows 95 is what Rube Goldberg would have designed if he'd studied cartooning at M.I.T.

Customer research produces bland products. We're producing a piece of art.

Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.

Every problem has a creative solution.

Sometimes, something seems dead, and then out of the blue, someone just figures out the way to fix a script and it goes.

Such is modern computing: everything simple is made too complicated because it's easy to fiddle with; everything complicated stays complicated because it's hard to fix.