John Denham Quotes

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

The fact was I had the vision... I think everyone has... what we lack is the method.

I studied to be an architect. And I find tremendous similarities between building a company and the design process. Businesses have to do their planning on the fly in a fashion similar to an architect sketching.

I'm fascinated with films that deal with strategy because there's a right way and a wrong way to get the job done.

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

Writing is sort of like chess for me. You have to think carefully before you move, thinking, planning.

By all means examine the games of the great chess players, but don't swallow them whole. Their games are valuable not for their separate moves, but for their vision of chess, their way of thinking.

We need to have a plan equal to the challenge.

Invention depends altogether upon execution or organization; as that is right or wrong so is the invention perfect or imperfect.

To design is to plan and to organize, to order, to relate and to control. In short it embraces all means of opposing disorder and accident. Therefore it signifies a human need and qualifies man’s thinking and doing.

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

Sometimes I do have something in my head. But, for me, I think it usually ends up being about considering all of the elements, and trying to understand the distance from where we are to where we want to go.

A heart to resolve, a head to contrive, and a hand to execute.

I learned how to order my thoughts, and most important, learned how to develop a plan. I discovered the power of a plan. If you can plan it out, and it seems logical to you, you can do it. And that was the secret to success.

It is sound planning that invariably earns us the outcome we want; without it, even the gods are unlikely to look with favour on our designs.

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?

One of the things Mr. Kennedy taught me was that in laying out a new project, you shouldn't try to cope with every little problem.

I like big thinkers who, no matter how big their vision, can sit down and talk to me about hour-to-hour, day-to-day type stuff they do to move the ball forward.

Design is nothing if not decision making.

Recognizing the need is the primary condition for design.

Failing to plan is planning to fail.

I felt a sense of fulfillment that an action plan, which I'd laid on the table on the 2nd of February 1990, had been fulfilled, had been properly implemented within the time frame which I envisaged.

Architects have created this fake separation between creation and execution. You can see it in architecture schools, where the students look down on going to contracts classes.

Intellectuals are good at seeing the big picture. But they are not so good at process.

Men of routine or men who can do what they are told are not hard to find; but men who can think and plan and tell the routine men what to do are very rare. They are paid in proportion to the supply and demand of them