Herbert A. Simon Quotes

Design is an iterative process. One idea often builds on another.

The technical process which is interesting in it's own right but I think the creative process is what's more intriguing to me.

The design process is about designing and prototyping and making. When you separate those, I think the final result suffers.

When any great design thou dost intend, Think on the means, the manner, and the end.

Design is a thinking process that starts in the head and with sketches. Thinking cannot be done by a computer.

Recognizing the need is the primary condition for design.

A designer is someone who constructs while he thinks, someone for whom planning and making go together.

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

Design is thinking made visual.

When you're designing and inventing the way I did, every minute of your life is put - every neuron in your brain into trying to think about the little code and how you can maybe have one less line of code and a little bit more straightforward from the beginning to the answer. And you don't have time to think about companies and products and how would I build this. So Steve Jobs and I were a very necessary pair.

The best kind of design isn't necessarily an object, a space, or a structure: it's a process- dynamic and adaptable.

So that is the design process or the creative process. Start with a problem, forget the problem, the problem reveals itself or the solution reveals itself and then you reevaulate it. This is what you are doing all the time.

What I tend to do is to wake about five in the morning-this happens quite often-think about the invention, and then image it in my mind in 3D, as a kind of construct. Then I do experiments with the image...sort of rotate it, and say, 'Well what'll happen if one does this?' And by the time I get up for breakfast I can usually go to the bench and make a string and sealing wax model that works straight off, because I've done most of the experiments already.

Creativity is the process that gives life to a new product.

To design things means to interfere with things: to think of how they might be and to alter how they are. Design is to making as writing is to speech: it is an ordinary physical activity pushed to a conscious edge. That interference with the given world can still be founded on admiration. Where it is not, what is the point of designing at all?

Design is a career where you learn creative decision making.

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

I think that during the shoot, you should never be there, unless something goes really wrong and as producer, you're responsible. The sign you did your job right is if you are not there.

Even the great scientists have reported that their creative break-throughs came at a time of mental quietude. The surprising result of a nationwide inquiry among America's most eminent mathematicians, including Einstein, to find out their working methods, was that thinking 'plays only a subordinate part in the brief, decisive phase of the creative act itself'.

When you're first thinking through an idea, it's important not to get bogged down in complexity. Thinking simply and clearly is hard to do.

I learned three important things in college-to use a library, to memorize quickly and visually, to drop asleep at any time given a horizontal surface and fifteen minutes. What I could not learn was to think creatively on schedule.

I don't use the computer. I do sketches, very quickly, often more than 100 on the same formal research.

The fact of the matter is, if you have to have a process, I think, to figure out how to make everything work together, you just don't get that. But maybe there's a way to do it.

It's not the ink, it's the think.