Design Iteration Quotes

There are really two things that have to occur in order for a new technology to be affordable to the mass market. One is you need economies of scale. The other is you need to iterate on the design. You need to go through a few versions.

Everyone by now presumably knows about the danger of premature optimization. I think we should be just as worried about premature design - designing too early what a program should do.

There are lots of people at our company who dedicate their time and effort to make sure that the journey from product design to hitting the screen is as seamless as possible.

Prototyping is the conversation you have with your ideas.

A design isn't finished until someone is using it.

I'm experimenting in public. At the design grad schools, these are people sitting around in groups, putting their work on a wall, analyzing it and putting it back in a drawer. I think there's little risk in that.

When I was a student and rushing to finish a project, my gut instinct was usually to keep adding all kinds of features. It's a way of papering over the fact that you haven't quite nailed your concept yet.

I describe the design process as like the tip of the iceberg. What you don't see is the long haul: all the endless auditing and things like that.

Successful design is not the achievement of perfection but the minimization and accommodation of imperfection.

Criticism per se does not worry me. I've always solicited it as part of the design process.

Architects love to rethink a project - that's what we do. If something is successful, like a house or a kettle, in this case, it's a great compliment when someone wants another one.

We no longer think of chairs as technology; we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn't worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often 'crash' when we tried to use them.

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

In fact, we started off with two or three different shells and the shell had life of its own.

If I'm doing a logo, I'll do it in black and white. Once the form is feeling right, only then do I start exploring the color palettes. A good example was the process of rebranding the Salvador Dali Museum. I did at least 100 versions in black and white.

At MakerBot, we joke that if we were engineers we would still be on our first prototype. There's something about just 'Doing it”iteration is a way of engineering.

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.

We've spent a lot of time on ergonomics. That was something we found to be really important as we iterated on the headset, from developer kits to Crescent Bay to the Rift.

So much in design is presented as a big miracle when it's just a repetition of what's been happening for 80 years.

... the designer of a new system must not only be the implementor and the first large-scale user; the designer should also write the first user manual. ... If I had not participated fully in all these activities, literally hundreds of improvements would never have been made, because I would never have thought of them or perceived why they were important.

In order to make a perfect and beautiful machine, it is not requisite to know how to make it. All the works of human genius can be understood in the end to be products of a cascade of generate-and-test procedures that are, at bottom, algorithmic and mindless.

Indeed the early history of rocket design could be read as the simple desire to get the rocket to function long enough to give an opportunity to discover where the failure occurred. Most early debacles were so benighted that rocket engineers could have been forgiven for daubing the blood of a virgin goat on the orifice of the firing chamber.

The biggest challenge and the thing I find most enjoyable about being a designer is taking everything in and assimilating it for your perspective, hopefully making it relevant and interesting to people.

With products the form is almost the finished piece, but with architecture it is not.

The problem with digital architecture is that an algorithm can produce endless variations, so an architect has many choices.