Design Systems Quotes & Sayings

Universal design systems can no longer be dismissed as the irrelevant musings of a small, localized design community. A second modernism has emerged, reinvigorating the utopian search for universal forms that marked the birth of design as a discourse and a discipline nearly a century earlier. — Ellen Lupton

Darwin's "strange inversion of reasoning" and Turing's equally revolutionary inversion were aspects of a single discovery: competence without comprehension. Comprehension, far from being a Godlike talent from which all design must flow, is an emergent effect of systems of uncomprehending competence: natural selection on the one hand, and mindless computation on the other. These twin ideas have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt, but they still provoke dismay and disbelief in some quarters, which I have tried to dispel in this chapter. Creationists are not going to find commented code in the inner workings of organisms, and Cartesians are not going to find an immaterial res cogitans "where all the understanding happens". — Daniel C. Dennett

Living organisms were not independently created, but have descended and diversified over time from common ancestors. And thus, no other biological theory so elegantly explains this. Evolutionary theory has withstood the test of time - by way of vicarious experimentation, observation, analysis, and relentless criticism, though opposing viewpoints still cling to the concept of "design." As a person of the biological sciences, I cannot subscribe to such misguided notions that suggest static biological states. Clearly, proper examination of the natural world reveal evolutionary trajectories - some random, others nonrandom - and all having observable genetic implications. It is only when we apply evolutionary explanations to living systems that it becomes ever so clear. The world was not specifically designed with us in mind, but rather we long since adapted and conformed to our surroundings, only giving it the illusionary appearance of "design. — Tommy Rodriguez

Arrested personal growth serves industrial "growth". By suppressing the nature dimension of human development (through educational systems, social values, advertising, nature-eclipsing vocations and pastimes, city and suburb design, denatured medical and psychological practices, and other means), industrial growth society engenders an immature citizenry unable to imagine a life beyond consumerism and soul-suppressing jobs. — Bill Plotkin

We can change our thinking. Rather than viewing the chemical adulteration of our environment and our bodies as the inevitable practice of convenience and progress, we can decide that cancer is inconvenient and toxic pollution archaic and primitive. We can start seeing the creation of carcinogens as the result of outmoded technologies. We can demand green engineering and green chemistry. We can let our systems of industry and agriculture know that they are suffering from a design flaw. — Sandra Steingraber

The general problem with ambitious systems is complexity. [ ... ] it is important to emphasize the value of simplicity and elegance, for complexity has a way of compounding difficulties. — Fernando J. Corbato

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What are they going to do about it?"
"So far? Get drunk. Yell at each other or at us. Design theoretical judicial systems. Most of them seem to want the whole thing to just go away sot hey can get on with their research."
Murtry chuckled. "God bless the eggheads. — James S.A. Corey

Developing and implementing IT governance design effectiveness and efficiency can be a multidirectional, interactive, iterative, and adaptive process. — Robert E. Davis

I am no saviour. I'm absolutely the last person on the planet who can practically help. I don't know how to make the different types of therapeutic feeding milk. I'm no chemist. I'm no doctor. I'm no engineer. I can't manufacture polio vaccines or organise their transportation to the health centres in Saramoussayah or Bissikirima. I can't build schools, or design drainage systems. I can't provide the women and children of Mandiana with water.All I can do now is help make people aware of what is happening, of what they are doing. That is all that I can do. For now. — Tom Hiddleston

With increasing fervor since the 1980s, sustainability has been the watchword of scientists, environmental activists, and indeed all those concerned about the complex, fragile systems on the sphere we inhabit. It has shaped debates about business, design, and our lifestyles. — Jamais Cascio

I had been impressed by the fact that biological systems were based on molecular machines and that we were learning to design and build these sorts of things. — K. Eric Drexler

I'm involved in everything from highly progressive lighting systems to airline interiors. In the field of transportation I can go from the micro to the macro: architecture, transportation, industrial product design, right across the board. It's Russian dollism, because they all interrelate: one goes into the other. — Ross Lovegrove

Theory is relevant to you because it shows you a new, simpler, and more elegant side of computers, which we normally consider to be complicated machines. The best computer designs and applications are conceived with elegance in mind. A theoretical course can heighten your aesthetic sense and help you build more beautiful systems. — Michael Sipser

A little retrospection shows that although many fine, useful software systems have been designed by committees and built as part of multipart projects, those software systems that have excited passionate fans are those that are the products of one or a few designing minds, great designers. — Fred Brooks

The central activity of engineering, as distinguished from science, is the design of new devices, processes and systems. — Myron Tribus

Software design as taught today is terribly incomplete. It talks only about what systems should do. It doesn't address the converse - things systems should not do. They should not crash, hang, lose data, violate privacy, lose money, destroy your company, or kill your customers. — Michael T. Nygard

In the judgment of design engineers, the ordinary means of communicating with a computer are entirely inadequate. [ ... ] Graphical communication in some form or other is of vital importance in engineering as that subject is now conducted; we must either provide the capability in our computer systems, or take on the impossible task of training up a future race of engineers conditioned to think in a different way. — Maurice Wilkes

I started in the industry in Public Relations, Quality Assurance, Information Systems and furniture moving. I tried my hand in design and haven't looked back. I'm fond of hackysack, racquetball, BBQ grilling, hanging out with my wife and friends — Dan Miller

Einstein said, " Imagination is more important than knowledge," but you'd be hard-pressed to find schools or corporations that invest in people with those priorities. The systems of education and professional life, similar by design, push the idea-finding habits of fun and play to the corners of our minds, training us out of our creativity.[117] We reward conformance of mind, not independent thought, in our systems - from school to college to the workplace to the home - yet we wonder why so few are willing to take creative risks. — Scott Berkun

Videogames are indeed design: They're sophisticated virtual machines that echo the mechanical systems inside cars. — John Maeda

For me, the concept of design is more than object-oriented; it encompasses the design of processes, systems and institutions as well. Increasingly, we need to think about designing the types of institutions we need to get things done in this rapidly accelerating world. — John Seely Brown

And I came to the conclusion that in any project we design and develop, the size and degree of complexity of the information and control systems inscribed in it are the crucial factors, so that the all-embracing and absolute perfection of the concept can in practice coincide, indeed ultimately must coincide, with its chronic dysfunction and constitutional instability. — W.G. Sebald

Today's environment is beginning to threaten today's organizations, finding them seriously deficient in their nervous system design ... The degree of coordination, perception, rational adaptation, etc., which will appear in the next generation of human organizations will drive our present organizational forms, with their clumsy nervous systems, into extinction. — Douglas Engelbart

The idea that hardware on networks should just be caches for movable process descriptions and the processes themselves goes back quite a ways. There's a real sense in which MS and Apple never understood networking or operating systems (or what objects really are), and when they decided to beef up their OSs, they went to (different) very old bad mainframe models of OS design to try to adapt to personal computers. — Alan Kay

we need to design our systems so that they are continually creating telemetry, widely — Gene Kim

Design bugs are often subtle and occur by evolution with early assumptions being forgotten as new features or uses are added to systems. — Fernando J. Corbato

Permaculture principles focus on thoughtful designs for small-scale intensive systems which are labor efficient and which use biological resources instead of fossil fuels. Designs stress ecological connections and closed energy and material loops. The core of permaculture is design and the working relationships and connections between all things. — Bill Mollison

How is the body, including the observing body, becoming a component of new machines, economies, apparatuses, whether social, libidinal, or technological? In what way is subjectivity becoming a precarious condition of interface between rationalized systems of exchange and networks of information? — Jonathan Crary

The most essential prediction of Darwinism is that, given an astronomical number of chances, unintelligent processes can make seemingly-designed systems, ones of the complexity of those found in the cell. ID specifically denies this, predicting that in the absence of intelligent input no such systems would develop. So Darwinism and ID make clear, opposite predictions of what we should find when we examine genetic results from a stupendous number of organisms that are under relentless pressure from natural selection. The recent genetic results are a stringent test. The results: 1) Darwinism's prediction is falsified; 2) Design's prediction is confirmed. — Michael J. Behe

We call the fates of the Titanic and the Concordia - as well as those of the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia - 'accidents.' Foreseeing such undesirable events is what engineers are expected to do. However, design trade-offs leave technological systems open to failings once predicted, but later forgotten. — Henry Petroski

I design genetic algorithms, neural network and artificial intelligence systems. — Frederick Lenz

... what society overwhelmingly asks for is snake oil. Of course, the snake oil has the most impressive names - otherwise you would be selling nothing - like "Structured Analysis and Design", "Software Engineering", "Maturity Models", "Management Information Systems", "Integrated Project Support Environments" "Object Orientation" and "Business Process Re-engineering". — Edsger Dijkstra

SystemC AMS provides a great modeling and simulation framework for integrated heterogeneous systems. The SystemC AMS 2.0 standard brings new capabilities for advanced behavioral modeling (e.g., multi-rate systems) and higher maturity for improved industrial acceptance. We at OFFIS see it as a major stepping stone towards a design methodology for cyber-physical systems. In our research we work on seamlessly integrating extra-functional properties such as power, temperature and aging into SystemC AMS models. — Frank Oppenheimer

Biological engineering is not necessarily understanding systems but rather, I want to be able to design and build biological systems to perform particular applications. — Drew Endy

The idea of sustainability can imply there is one perfect, unchanging future, if only we could work out how to get there. Resilience might be more useful, in that it assumes a dynamic environment and that perfection is impossible. You need to design systems to accommodate failure rather than eliminate it. By trying to be perfect, many visions of sustainability are quite brittle — Jamais Cascio

Systems awareness and systems design are important for health professionals, but they are not enough. They are enabling mechanisms only. It is the ethical dimensions of individuals that are essential to a system's success. Ultimately, the secret of quality is love. You have to love your patient, you have to love your profession, you have to love your God. If you have love, you can then work backward to monitor and improve the system. — Avedis Donabedian

We will soon be living in an era in which we cannot guarantee survivability of any single point. However, we can still design systems in which system destruction requires the enemy to pay the price of destroying n of n stations. If n is made sufficiently large, it can be shown that highly survivable system structures can be built. — Paul Baran

The constructive intellect [genius] produces thoughts, sentences, poems, plans, designs, systems. It is the generation of the mind, the marriage of thought with nature. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the future, human rights will be increasingly a universal criterion for designing ethical systems. — Mahnaz Afkhami

Systems programmers are the high priests of a low cult. — Bob Barton

My opportunity to design school choice systems began in 2003 with a phone call from Jeremy Lack at the New York City Department of Education. He knew of my work on the medical match and wondered if similar efforts might help reorganize the dysfunctional, congested system then used to match students to high schools. — Alvin E. Roth

Molecular machines display a key signature or hallmark of design, namely, irreducible complexity. In all irreducibly complex systems in which the cause of the system is known by experience or observation, intelligent design or engineering played a role in the origin of the system ... We find such systems within living organisms. — Scott A. Minnich

Molecular biology has shown that even the simplest of all living systems on the earth today, bacterial cells, are exceedingly complex objects. Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 10-12 gms, each is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the nonliving world. — Michael Denton

To eliminate the concept of waste means to design things-products, packaging, and systems-from the very beginning on the understanding that waste does not exist. — William McDonough

found on other Unix-like systems. The design is actually specified in a published standard called the Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. — William E. Shotts Jr.

In fact, biology is chaos. Biological systems are the product not of logic but of evolution, an inelegant process. Life does not choose the logically best design to meet a new situation. It adapts what already exists...The result, unlike the clean straight lines of logic, is often irregular, messy. — John M Barry

Over and over, people try to design systems that make tomorrow's work easy. But when tomorrow comes it turns out they didn't quite understand tomorrow's work, and they actually made it harder. — Ward Cunningham

One of the great enemies of design is when systems or objects become more complex than a person - or even a team of people - can keep in their heads. This is why software is generally beneath contempt. — Bran Ferren

There is only one revolution tolerable to all men, all societies, all political systems: Revolution by design and invention. — R. Buckminster Fuller

For years, computer scientists were treating operating systems design as sort of an open-reserch issue, when the field's direction had been decided by commercial operations. Computer science has become completely cut off from reality. — David Gelernter

Flow systems have two basic features (properties). There is the current that is flowing (for example, fluid, heat, mass, or information) and the design through which it flows. — Adrian Bejan

WordPress is undoubtedly one of the best content management systems today and its predominance over the IT market is in upsurge. Here some must have plugins for your website that we suggest. — Josh Wilson

Intelligent design is consistent with any faith system I can think of, because most faith systems believe that there is a creator. — Lee Strobel

Design is a form of competitive advantage. People tend to think of design as good art, good visual language, which it absolutely has to be. But it's also about the ability to do systems thinking. — James P Hackett

The fundamental claim of intelligent design is straightforward and easily intelligible: namely, there are natural systems that cannot be adequately explained in terms of undirected natural forces and that exhibit features which in any other circumstance we would attribute to intelligence. — William A. Dembski

By fundamentally changing how we design the places and systems that enable our daily lives, we can slash emissions way beyond the immediate carbon savings - because our own personal emissions are just the tip of a vast iceberg of energy and resources consumed far from our view. — Alex Steffen

Each of these strategies-get a little better at it, design a support system, use one of your strongest themes to overwhelm your weakness, find a partner, and just stop doing it-can help you as you strive to build your life around your strengths. — Donald O. Clifton

Linking the digital and physical worlds in these ways will have profound implications for both. But this future won't be realized unless the Internet of Things learns from the history of the Internet. The open standards and decentralized design of the Internet won out over competing proprietary systems and centralized control by offering fewer obstacles to innovation and growth. This battle has resurfaced with the proliferation of conflicting visions of how devices should communicate. The challenge is primarily organizational, rather then technological, a contest between command-and-control technology and distributed solutions. The Internet of Things demands the latter, and openness will eventually triumph. — Anonymous

Traditional agriculture was labour intensive, industrial agriculture is energy intensive, and permaculture-designed systems are information and design intensive. — David Holmgren

The conclusion of intelligent design flows naturally from the data itself - not from sacred books or sectarian beliefs. Inferring that biochemical systems were designed by an intelligent agent is a humdrum process that requires no new principles of logic or science. It comes simply from the hard work that biochemistry has done over the past forty years, combined with consideration of the way in which we reach conclusions of design every day. — Michael J. Behe

Today I am more convinced than ever. Conceptual integrity is central to product quality. Having a system architect is the most important single step toward conceptual integrity. These principles are by no means limited to software systems, but to the design of any complex construct, whether a computer, an airplane, a Strategic Defense Initiative, a Global Positioning System. After teaching a software engineering laboratory more than 20 times, I came to insist that student teams as small as four people choose a manager and a separate architect. Defining distinct roles in such small teams may be a little extreme, but I have observed it to work well and to contribute to design success even for small teams. — Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

There's no way to design a society that's optimal or utopian. It's better than the one that was. Systems always undergo change. — Jacque Fresco

My laboratory is interested in the related challenges of understanding the origin of life on the early earth, and constructing synthetic cellular life in the laboratory. Focusing on artificial life frees us to explore novel chemical systems, but what we learn from these systems helps us to understand possible pathways leading to the origin of life. Our basic design for a synthetic cell involves the encapsulation of a spontaneously replicating nucleic acid, which acts as the genetic material, within a spontaneously replicating membrane vesicle, which provides spatial localization. We are using chemical synthesis to make nucleic acids with modified nucleobases and sugar-phosphate backbones. — Jack W. Szostak

In order to survive, all systems must evolve by providing greater and greater access to the currents that flow through them. This applies to all physical, biological and social systems that survive and thrive ... But let's take that one step forward ... the systems just described are ... constantly evolving. This suggests another design principle: ... design for evolution rather than creating a static design optimizing for the present. — John Hagel