Design Materials Quotes & Sayings

I am passionate about what design can do - how far it can support the new ideas and the new ways of living of this 21st Century. Good design accelerates this exciting future where manufacturing is local, materials and processes are cradle to cradle, business models are both socially and financially driven. — Yves Behar

He was occupied with the forming of a pattern out of the manifold chaos of life, and the materials with which he worked seemed to make preoccupation with pigments and words very trivial. Lawson had served his turn. Philip's friendship with him had been a motive in the design he was elaborating: it was merely sentimental to ignore the fact that the painter was of no further interest to him. — W. Somerset Maugham

The materials were of the finest, the workmanship superlative, the design execrable. — Jonathan L. Howard

Aficionados of Slow design and Slow fashion use ethical and green materials to make objects - furniture, clothes, jewellery - that lift the spirit and last a lifetime rather than one catwalk season. — Carl Honore

The accumulated knowledge of materials, computing, electromagnetism, product design, and all the rest that we've learned over the last several centuries converts a few ounces of raw materials worth mere pennies into a device with more computing power than the entire planet possessed fifty years ago. — Ramez Naam

Design is not the act of amazing an audience with the novelty of forms or materials; it is the originality that repeatedly extracts astounding ideas from the crevices of the very commonness of everyday life. — Kenya Hara

Sculptures created from found materials like ice and thorns, driftwood, and even bleached kangaroo bones all presuppose that artistic design will yield to the cycles of time and climate, whether over an hour or a decade. — Simon Schama

Design ... is the integration of technological, social, and economical requirements, biological necessities, and the psychological effects of materials, shape, color, volume and space. — Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

The design of good houses requires an understanding of both the construction materials and the behavior of real humans. — Peter Morville

What I've got here are my own constraints. I'm challenging myself, using found objects and making stuff that throws all this computational capacity at, you know, these trivial problems, like car-driving Elmo clusters and seashell toaster-robots. We have so much capacity that the trivia expands to fill it. And all that capacity is junk-capacity, it's leftovers. There's enough computational capacity in a junkyard to launch a space-program, and that's by design. Remember the iPod? Why do you think it was so prone to scratching and going all gunky after a year in your pocket? Why would Apple build a handheld technology out of materials that turned to shit if you looked at them cross-eyed? It's because the iPod was only meant to last a year! — Cory Doctorow

A challenging economy is always good for design. It unites necessity and functionality. You are forced to be creative with poor materials. — Diane Von Furstenberg

The tragic effects of terrorism have forced the new-construction industry to re-evaluate traditional methods of fire protection in commercial infrastructures. That includes everything from building codes, to structural design issues and the less durable fireproofing materials currently specified for commercial steel structures. — Craig Scott

The tides of time should be able to imprint the passing of the years on an object. The physical decay or natural wear and tear of the materials used does not in the least detract from the visual appeal, rather it adds to it. It is the changes of texture and colour that provide the space for the imagination to enter and become more involved with the devolution of the piece. Whereas modern design often uses inorganic materials to defy the natural ageing effects of time, wabi sabi embraces them and seeks to use this transformation as an integral part of the whole. This is not limited to the process of decay, but can also be found at the moment of inception, when life is taking its first fragile steps toward becoming. — Andrew Juniper

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

Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us. — Alain De Botton

The exposure I have had to beautiful materials across the world, from Japan to Italy, enables me to pull design ideas together. This, combined with years of historical research, has created a great fountain of ideas for me. — Colleen Atwood

One should make one's life a mosaic. Let the general design be good, the colors lively, and the materials diversified ... — Marthe Bibesco

Imagine if all the car makers in the world were to sit down together to design one extremely simple, embellishment-free, functional car that was made from the most environmentally-sustainable materials, how cheap to buy and humanity-and-Earth-considerate that vehicle would be. And imagine all the money that would be saved by not having different car makers duplicating their efforts, competing and trying to out-sell each other, and overall how much time that would liberate for all those people involved in the car industry to help those less fortunate and suffering in the world. Likewise, imagine when each house is no longer designed to make an individualised, ego-reinforcing, status-symbol statement for its owners and all houses are constructed in a functionally satisfactory, simple way, how much energy, labour, time and expense will be freed up to care for the wellbeing of the less fortunate and the planet. — Jeremy Griffith

I love to design and remodel houses, from working with the contractors to picking the colours, materials, kitchen and bathroom accessories to finally what furniture goes where. — Olivia Newton-John

It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design. — Antony Flew

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

I could design an $800 shoe line; it's easy. You use the best materials and you can make beautiful shoes. It's easier than making great shoes for $90. — Steve Madden

The debut show, "Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary," is supposed to be about how artists reuse humble or unusual materials. There's good work here, but much of what's on view is actually more about obsession and repetition: a couch made out of 3,500 quarters, a necklace composed of 100 handgun triggers. The building [of Museum of Arts and Design], too, seems caught between wanting to be an object of decorative delectation and making an architectural statement. — Jerry Saltz

Most of the designers are eco-friendly, even by default, through their use of up-cycled materials and organic fabrics, and by producing in small quantities. Ultimately, the design has to be great - no one will buy it if it looks like a hemp sack! — Amber Valletta

To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is twenty kilometers in diameter and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the port holes of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity. — Michael Denton

The emergent properties of my computer have existence not because they inhere in the component parts that compose them. They do so because those component materials are related to one another by careful design to work together as a single system in order to produce those properties. The visual, informational, and computational abilities of my computer are new realities, yet not present in the sum total of the inputs of which my computer is constituted. It is only through their systemic relationships that those amazing abilities have being. The novel reality takes existence not through the parts but through their relationships and interactions. Reality is thus significantly constituted through relationality, not merely composition. — Christian Smith

No design is possible until the materials with which you design are completely understood — Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

To quiet the land. When there has been unspecific trauma on the land and residents feel the impact, it is possible to do a constellation to identify the trauma and ask blessing of the land To inform land use: reforestation, development of both the land and communities that interface with the land To inform architectural design: Identify locations for green spaces and test environmentally sound building materials To inform energy choices: passive solar, hydro, wind, alternative building practices To support real estate transactions- Why won't a place sell, supporting potential buyers to be able to look at properties in a systemic way To support environmentally based community action agencies Work with pets- both for veterinary practice and to — Francesca Boring

Pictures, abstract symbols, materials, and colors are among the ingredients with which a designer or engineer works. To design is to discover relationships and to make arrangements and rearrangements among these ingredients. — Paul Rand

I do make my own brushes and have done so for many years. I'm constantly refining the designs, trying new materials, re-configuring other brushes - all in my never-ending quest for the perfect brush. — James Nares

Having lasted for 4,000 years, the use of nature's materials to express ideas about nature may be expected to continue. The best garden designs are produced with an awareness of the art, science, history, geography, philosophy, social habits and construction techniques of their period. — Tom Turner

Skill in the digital age is confused with mastery of digital tools, masking the importance of understanding materials and mastering the elements of form. — John Maeda

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

I defy anyone to design a hat, coat or dress that hasn't been done before ... The only new frontier left in fashion is the finding of new materials — Paco Rabanne

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