Quotes & Sayings About Design Function

Where the average person appreciates the beauty of surf and waves, Gus, an engineer, sees only practical design. Gravity, plus ocean current, plus wind. Poetry to the common man is a unicorn viewed from the corner of an eye - an unexpected glimpse of the intangible. To an engineer, only the ingenuity of pragmatic solutions is poetic. Function over form. It's not a question of optimism or pessimism, a glass half full or half empty. To an engineer, the glass is simply too big. — Noah Hawley

She was the sort of person who needed to be kept happy, he realized. Not as a matter of selfish expectation, but as a simple fact of design; like a piano or a harp, she'd been made to function best at a certain tuning. — Kate Morton

Good design is probably 98% common sense. Above all, an object must function well and efficiently-and getting that part right requires a good deal of time and attention. — Terence Conran

Visiting his neighbours' apartments, he would find himself physically repelled by the contours of an award-winning coffee-pot, by the well-modulated colour schemes, by the good taste and intelligence that, Midas-like, had transformed everything in these apartments into an ideal marriage of function and design. — J.G. Ballard

What's the number-one thing people do on the Web? They read. Words and numbers are the raw material from which the vast majority of webpages are built. If reading is the primary activity on the Web, then readability is a primary function of Web design. — Gerry McGovern

My thesis [is] that in order to design a tool, we must make our best efforts to understand the larger social and physical context within which it is intended to function — Bill Buxton

At first glance, the key and the lock it fits may seem very different," Sazed said. "Different in shape, different in function, different in design. The man who looks at them without knowledge of their true nature might think them opposites, for one is meant to open, and the other to keep closed. Yet, upon closer examination he might see that without one, the other becomes useless. The wise man then sees that both lock and key were created for the same purpose. — Brandon Sanderson

A man-made thing that produces pleasure (and criticism) by somehow taping into the order of the universe is beautiful. Making beautiful things makes our lives worthwhile. My teacher, and one of the founders of the Pratt industrial design program, Rowena Reed Kostellow, said, "Pure, unadulterated beauty should be the goal of civilization." From a pragmatic point of view, for something to be beautiful, it has to work. In order to make this idea clearer I have combined the ideas of beauty and function into one word: Beautility. — Tucker Viemeister

The essential function of the (design) profession in our society is to enhance and cultivate communications toward: Easier understanding of ideas and complex problems, in the shortest possible time and higher visual and auditory retention of data. — Will Burtin

Design is ... above all an effort to improve reality ... I always try to begin with considerations of its function ... I ask myself, who needs it, which materials best suit its functions and so on ... — Gianfranco Frattini

In the broad sense design means thinking about what the function or purpose of things or processes are, and translating that into action. — Howard Rheingold

Design acknowledges change. Its meaning encompasses change in our times. To design is to 'create order and to function according to a plan.' The notion of change and design move along the same path. — Sara Little Turnbull

Wisdom is in large part the knowledge of how to avoid doing dumb things, and thus grows globally as a function of the published inventory of stupid mistakes. — Tim Bray

Everything God does has purpose and intention behind that design. It is a master design, and every little thing has its proper place and function. — A.W. Tozer

No, seriously, you should bury her up to her neck and throw rocks at her until she dies. What a crazy lunatic, offering her child a normal, healthy mammalian childhood. A woman in full bloom of health daring to use her body according to its biological design and function? Gross! When she could be purchasing from a multinational corporation a totally inferior product for the same purpose. That's downright un-American. And to do so within full view of an intellectual such as yourself!? Tie her up and SET HER ON FUCKING FIRE. — Elisa Albert

With function, flow, and form as basis, design is evaluated as a process culminating in an entity which intensifies comprehension. — Ladislav Sutnar

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. — Norman Mailer

When Design become Useless it becomes Art. Yesterday's Artisans are today's Artists. — Vineet Raj Kapoor

Nothing should be more obvious than that the business organism cannot function according to design when its most important "parameters of action" - wages, prices, interest - are transferred to the political sphere and there dealt with according to the requirements of the political game or, which sometimes is more serious still, according to the ideas of some planners. — Joseph Alois Schumpeter

I realize that having a style would be very beneficial for my practice from a marketing standpoint, but I can't do it. I believe my responsibilities as an architect are to design the most appropriate building for the place. Each place has a distinct culture and function, which for me requires an appropriate answer. — Cesar Pelli

An artist's job is to inspire, from the Latin inspirare: to breathe into. The primary function of art is to inspire new thought shaped by emotions using the creative mediums we master - be it painting, music, design, craft, or photography. — Anonymous

We have no longer an outside and an inside as two separate things. Now the outside may come inside and the inside may and does go outside. They are of each other. Form and function thus become one in design and execution if the nature of materials and method and purpose are all in unison. — Frank Lloyd Wright

I think a lot of times people design restaurants with flash in mind. I think you should design restaurants with function in mind. Make sure it's functional and works with what you're trying to accomplish. Design can come later. — Bobby Flay

Puma was all about function and not at all about design. The founder of the company always believed functionality and performance were the only ingredients that could make Puma successful and design never mattered. — Jochen Zeitz

It's putting the aesthetic of a design before the function of a design. Those two things need to be in balance. Something can look beautiful and read beautifully but those two things need to be in balance. If a design is in the way of the actual communication, it's ten times worse. — Denise Bosler

There's design, and there's art. Good design is total harmony. There's no better designer than nature - if you look at a branch or a leaf, it's perfect. It's all function. Art is different. It's about emotion. It's about suffering and beauty - but mostly suffering! — Diane Von Furstenberg

I went and studied graphic design, because it seemed to me that advertising is more honest - the image actually has a function. But once I started on that, I realized that was really boring. — Brian Froud

We are ... the un-proud non-possessors of objects whose chief substance is that of the transient symbol. Our Puritan fear of the love of things turns out to have been groundless after all, for we do not love things or even possess them: they pass through our lives as barium passes through the digestive tract, unassimilated, their function merely to flash signals along the way. — Ralph Caplan

Designing is not a profession but an attitude. Design has many connotations. It is the organization of materials and processes in the most productive way, in a harmonious balance of all elements necessary for a certain function. It is the intergration of technological, social, and economical requirements, biological necessities, and the psychological effects of materials, shape, color, volume and space. Thinking in relationships. — Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

For Satan, as for Marx, religion was an impediment to the grand design of transforming humanity from a collection of free-willed, autonomous individuals into a mass of self-corralling slaves who mistake security for liberty and try to keep the cognitive dissonance to a minimum in order to function. — Michael Walsh

Everything that I do has a certain mechanical logic to it, and follows my definition of design
which is function with cultural content. — Carl Magnusson

Design is the organization of materials and processes in the most productive way, in a harmonious balance of all elements necessary for a certain function. — Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

Modernism isn't a design ethos any more, it's an economy of scale, and a marketing tool to sell the ordinary as something special, the sexless as erotic. A technological device without a specific, personalized identity has a subtext: it asserts the value of instrumentality. Its design is a reflection of its role ... The anonymity of these objects is part of what they are: interchangeable commodities whose uniqueness in so far as they possess any is created by what is done with them. Function is an identity. And that identity is something we are encouraged to incorporate into our perception of self, that anonymity is proposed as something to emulate. Whimsy and uniqueness are indulgences. — Nick Harkaway

Good design is not about form following function. It is function with cultural content. By adding "cultural content" to the concept of "form follows function," objects cease to be finite or predictable. Maybe the right way to interpret the dictum is to first acknowledge that the function needs to be clearly understood before the form is considered. — Carl Magnusson

Lurking behind this connecting silence is a brooding suspicion over the extent to which the perceptual user-preferences of the human animal limit and distort its experience of reality, and the consequently unreliable nature of much of its thought. Poetry is the means by which we correct the main tool of that thought, language, for its anthropic distortions: it is language's self-corrective function, and everywhere challenges our Adamite inheritance - the catastrophic, fragmenting design of our conceptualizing machinery - through the insistence on a counterbalancing project, that of lyric unity. — Don Paterson

That which struck the present writer most forcibly on his first perusal of the 'Origin of Species' was the conviction that Teleology, as commonly understood, had received its deathblow at Mr. Darwin's hands. For the teleological argument runs thus: an organ or organism (A) is precisely fitted to perform a function or purpose (B); therefore it was specially constructed to perform that function. — Thomas Henry Huxley