Joe Gebbia Quotes

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.

We struggle with the right words to describe the design process at Apple. But it is very much about designing and prototyping and making.

I knew a lot about product design before coming to Apple, but I didn't understand a lot about consumer experience design, which is really Apple's forte.

User-centered design means understanding what your users need, how they think, and how they behave - and incorporating that understanding into every aspect of your process.

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.

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.

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

There are two different types of prototyping. First, the gut sense. You know how far you can take it. Second, you need experts to figure out whether or not it is attainable.

User-centered design means working with your users all throughout the project.

Business owners should think of designers as architects, not decorators.

Design is nothing if not decision making.

The only important thing about design is how it relates to people.

Design is people.

You can't start a product simply by building it. You have to know why you're building it, and you might go down the wrong rabbit hole, waste time, and confuse things. Spending long afternoons with a sketchbook or talking through your ideas with other people can save a year in software development later on.

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?'

My focus is incredibly narrow. I can't talk with any authority other than design and development of product.

The nature of design is to synthesize disparate perspectives and create a richer end product through collaboration and iteration.

Design, in its broadest sense, is the enabler of the digital era.

We don't do focus groups - that is the job of the designer. It's unfair to ask people who don't have a sense of the opportunities of tomorrow from the context of today to design.

Design is really an act of communication, which means having a deep understanding of the person with whom the designer is communicating.

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

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.

Recognizing the need is the primary condition for design.

We built the iPod in weeks. It had to be what I thought it was going to be because there wasn't time for endless refinements.

I tried a dozen different modifications that were rejected. But they all served as a path to the final design.