Design Failure Quotes

I've learnt something from every failure. The products I helped design at the first two companies I worked for were utter failures. But now I know why.

The design of everyday things is in great danger of becoming the design of superfluous, overloaded, unnecessary things.

Clutter is not a property of information. Clutter is a failure of design.

Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information.

Early in my career, I was involved with engineer-led projects, where designers came in late in the game and were expected to put lipstick on an existing code base. This almost never works.

Here's the general theory: To clarify, add detail. Imagine that. To clarify, add detail. And clutter and overload are not an attribute of information, they are failures of design. If the information is in chaos, don't start throwing out information, instead fix the design.

Failure is central to engineering. Every single calculation that an engineer makes is a failure calculation. Successful engineering is all about understanding how things break or fail.

When I go into a store and find a T-shirt that's well-designed with a great fabric but the fit is all wrong, the T-shirt is ruined for me.

Confusion and clutter are failures of design, not attributes of information. And so the point is to find design strategies that reveal detail and complexity - rather than to fault the data for an excess of complication. Or, worse, to fault viewers for a lack of understanding.

That's just tragic, that you can spend four years of your life studying the design of three dimensional objects and not make one.

Space, space: architects always talk about space! But creating a space is not automatically doing architecture. With the same space, you can make a masterpiece or cause a disaster.

Case studies of failure should be made a part of the vocabulary of every engineer so that he or she can recall or recite them when something in a new design or design process is suggestive of what went wrong in the case study.

What is commonly overlooked in using the computer is the fact that the central goal of design is still to obviate failure, and thus it is critical to identify exactly how a structure may fail. The computer cannot do this by itself . . .

I employ case studies of failure into my courses, emphasizing that they teach us much more than studies of success. It is not that success stories cannot serve as models of good design or as exemplars of creative engineering. They can do that, but they cannot teach us how close to failure they are.

If a building looks better under construction than it does when finished, then it's a failure.

Far too few designers put any thought into usability, ending up with a great product that's completely inaccessible.

I was trying to convince all these men to try to make a product that they didn't even wear! Or if they did wear them, they were not admitting it! There was the problem right there. No wonder their hosiery was so uncomfortable.

Form follows failure.

Airplanes were invented by natural selection. Now you can say that intelligent design designs our airplanes of today, but there was no intelligent design really designing those early airplanes. There were probably at least 30,000 different things tried, and when they crash and kill the pilot, don't try that again.

You can almost say that a design error is a human error because, after all, it's we humans who do the designing.

It is a hopeless endeavor to make the form and content of earlier architectural epochs usable for our time; in this, even the strongest artistic talent must fail. We see repeatedly how the outstanding builders fail to achieve an effect because their work does not serve the will of the age.

Noise is a parasite. Anything noisy is poorly designed.

American products are marvels of production and functionality, but were unnecessarily and unbearably ugly, noisy smelly and offensive.

I like to watch the way a model moves in my clothes, the way she gives them life, or if they are wrong, stillborn, the way her life rejects them.

When you as a designer design something that burdens a community with maintenance and old world technology, basically failed developed world technology, then you will crush that community way beyond bad design; you'll destroy the economics of that community, and often the community socially is broken.