When I get an idea I start at once building it up in my imagination. I change the construction, make improvements and operate the device in my mind. It is absolutely immaterial to me whether I run my turbine in my thought or test it in my shop. I even note if it is out of balance.
Engineering is the closest thing to magic that exists in the world.
People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on marketing research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.
Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it's this veneer - that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!' That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
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.
Design is a conscious and intuitive effort to impose meaningful order. Design is both the underlying matrix of order and the tool that creates it.
I fervently believe in research as a necessity for good design, and I teach it that way.
Everything starts with design.
Engineering without imagination sinks to a trade.
Design has always been a driving force in my life: it's the lens through which I experience the world.
Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. The iMac is not just the color or translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together.
Architects today tend to depreciate themselves, to regard themselves as no more than just ordinary citizens without the power to reform the future.
Order and creativity are complementary.
When I studied graphic design, I learned a valuable lesson: There's no perfect answer to the puzzle, and creativity is a renewable resource.
Creativity is the process that gives life to a new product.
You cannot understand good design if you do not understand people; design is made for people.
Design is something you have to put your hand to.
What I learned from my years in Silicon Valley is that design can have a primary role in how a business is shaped, how a company can be design-driven. In my experience of large industry in Europe, that knowledge has been lost.
In the design process, there's a need to be culturally comprehensive.
In the '70s and '80s there was an attempt in K-12 to teach science through art or art through science. The challenge today is how do you build the ethos of art and design into the academy of science.
You‘ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology - not the other way around.
To invent is to discern, to choose.
Design, in its broadest sense, is the enabler of the digital era.
Design is a response to a specific problem. You are given a problem to solve, and then you let the problem itself tell you what your solution is.
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.
