Design Theory Quotes & Sayings

Landscape design theory has been rotting away, peacefully, like a garden temple, since the close of the eighteenth century. — Tom Turner

I am only a footnote, but proud of the footnote I have become. My subsequent work on eliciting principles and developing the theory of interface design, so that many people will be able to do what I did is probably also footnote-worthy. In looking back at this turn-of-the-century period, the rise of a worldwide network will be seen as the most significant part of the computer revolution. — Jef Raskin

Theory can blind observation. — Carol Gilligan

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

Garden design theory explains, or should explain, the 'What, Where, Why and How' of making gardens. — Tom Turner

When the bones of prehistoric animals began to be discovered and scrutinized in the nineteenth century, there were those who said that the fossils had been placed in the rock by god, in order to test our faith. This cannot be disproved. Nor can my own pet theory that, from the patterns of behavior that are observable, we may infer a design that makes planet earth, all unknown to us, a prison colony and lunatic asylum that is employed as a dumping ground by far-off and superior civilizations. However, I was educated by Sir Karl Popper to believe that a theory that is unfalsifiable is to that extent a weak one. — Christopher Hitchens

Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best. — Peter Thiel

The strengths landscape architecture draws from its garden design heritage include: the Vitruvian design tradition of balancing utility, firmness and beauty; use of the word 'landscape' to mean 'a good place' - as the objective of the design process; a comprehensive approach to open space planning involving city parks, greenways and nature outside towns; a planning theory about the contextualisation of development projects; the principle that development plans should be adapted to their landscape context. — Tom Turner

Trying to design or reclaim places is, therefore, rather like trying to make or modify life itself. In this effort, it is wisest to adopt the gentle patient manner of an environmental midwife, while rejecting utterly the machine-driven arrogance of some environmental equivalent to a genetic engineer. By such gentle means places might flourish again, but also the world might become less threatened. — Edward Relph

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

Leo Hurwicz is the father of mechanism design theory and has inspired much of my work, and Roger Myerson is an old friend and collaborator and a tremendous economist. — Eric Maskin

The idea of a universal mind or Logos would be, I think, a fairly plausible inference from the present state of scientific theory. — Arthur Eddington

The theory of mechanism design can be thought of as the 'engineering' side of economic theory. — Eric Maskin

The Game gives you a Purpose. The Real Game is, to Find a Purpose. — Vineet Raj Kapoor

Here's the general theory: To clarify, add detail. Imagine that. To clarify, add detail. And clutter and overload are not an attribute of information, they are failures of design. If the information is in chaos, don't start throwing out information, instead fix the design. — Edward Tufte

I'm not into politics but I am committed to a cause: ensuring design technology and engineering stays on the U.K. curriculum, alongside science and maths - grounding abstract theory, merging the practical with the academic. — James Dyson

Perhaps, the highest pleasure in art is identical with the highest pleasure in scientific theory. The emotion which accompanies the clear recognition of unity in a complex seems so similar in art and in science that it is difficult not to suppose that they are psychologically the same. It is, as it were, the final stage of both a processes.This unity-emotion in science supervenes upon a process of pure mechanical reasoning; in art it supervenes upon a process of which emotion has all along been an essential concomitant. — Roger Fry

These forays into the real world sharpened his view that scientists needed the widest possible education. He used to say, "How can you design for people if you don't know history and psychology? You can't. Because your mathematical formulas may be perfect, but the people will screw it up. And if that happens, it means you screwed it up." He peppered his lectures with quotations from Plato, Chaka Zulu, Emerson, and Chang-tzu.

But as a professor who was popular with his students - and who advocated general education - Thorne found himself swimming against the tide. The academic world was marching toward ever more specialized knowledge, expressed in ever more dense jargon. In this climate, being liked by your students was a sign of shallowness; and interest in real-world problems was proof of intellectual poverty and a distressing indifference to theory. — Michael Crichton

Throughout his last half-dozen books, for example, Arthur Koestler has been conducting a campaign against his own misunderstanding of Darwinism. He hopes to find some ordering force, constraining evolution to certain directions and overriding the influence of natural selection. [ ... ] Darwinism is not the theory of capricious change that Koestler imagines. Random variation may be the raw material of change, but natural selection builds good design by rejecting most variants while accepting and accumulating the few that improve adaptation to local environments. — Stephen Jay Gould

Evolution as described by Charles Darwin is an scientific theory, abundantly reconfirmed, explaining physical phenomena by physical causes. Intelligent Design is a faith-based initiative in rhetorical argument. Should we teach I.D. in America's public schools? Yes, let's do - not as science, but alongside other spiritual beliefs, such as Islam, Zoroastrianism and the Hindu Idea that Earth rests on Chukwa, the giant turtle. — David Quammen

Intelligent Design is a remarkably uncreative theory that abandons the search for understanding at the very point where it is most needed. If Intelligent Design is really a science, then the burden is on its scientists to discover the mechanisms used by the Intelligent Designer. (80) — Michael Shermer

Darwin- I think the theory is: out of 'chaos' arises something that resembles 'design'. But it's all random. — Joyce Carol Oates

Mere lack of evidence, of course, is no reason to denounce a theory. Look at intelligent design. The fact that it is bollocks hasn't stopped a good many people from believing in it. Darwinism itself is only supported by tons of evidence, which is a clear indication that Darwin didn't write his books himself. — Eric Idle

I don't think that design needs theory, but I think designers need theory. — Johanna Drucker

The principles of classical management theory have become so deeply ingrained in the ways managers think about organizations that for most of them the design of formal structures, linked by clear lines of communication, coordination, and control, has become almost second nature. This largely unconscious embrace of the mechanistic approach to management has now become one of the main obstacles to organizational change. — Fritjof Capra

Such work would never be done if scientists were satisfied with a lazy default such as 'intelligent design theory' would encourage. Here is the message that an imaginary 'intelligent design theorist' might broadcast to scientists: 'If you don't understand how something works, never mind: just give up and say God did it. You don't know how the nerve impulse works? Good! You don't understand how memories are laid down in the brain? Excellent! Is photosynthesis a bafflingly complex process? Wonderful! Please don't go to work on the problem, just give up, and appeal to God. Dear scientist, don't work on your mysteries. Bring us your — Richard Dawkins

When I arrived at Harvard, I wanted to design a course in political theory that would have interested me, back when I was started out, in a way that the standard things didn't. — Michael Sandel

What I should have said is that he thinks that there is a conflict between evolutionary biology and theism. Dennett thinks that evolutionary theory shows that it is irrational to believe that God exists; he thinks that the theory has this consequence because he thinks that the Design Argument was the only remotely plausible argument for God's existence and evolutionary theory destroyed that argument. — Elliott Sober

Think of it this way: if you wandered into a cave and saw scratched into the wall some markings which on closer inspection read "Gary woz ere", how would you think that they got there? Would you guess that a river had run through and eroded the wall into a shape? Would you think that perhaps a bear had been sharpening his claws on the rough surface? Or would you be sensible and immediately recognise that someone called Gary, who was probably a bit of a yob, had been through and wanted to leave a message for the world? — Lewis N. Roe

The sculptor, and the painter also, should be trained in these liberal arts: grammar, geometry, philosophy, medicine, astronomy, perspective, history, anatomy, theory of design, arithmetic. — Lorenzo Ghiberti

Even though their arguments did not invoke religion, I think we all know what's behind these arguments. They're trying to protect religious beliefs from contradiction by science. They used to do it by prohibiting teachers from teaching evolution at all; then they wanted to teach intelligent design as an alternative theory; now they want the supposed "weaknesses" in evolution pointed out. But it's all the same program - it's all an attempt to let religious ideas determine what is taught in science courses. — Steven Weinberg

The problem with intelligent-design theory, is not that it is false but that it is not falsifiable. Not being susceptible to contradicting evidence, it is not a testable hypothesis. Hence it is not a scientific but a creedal tenet - a matter of faith, unsuited to a public school's science curriculum. — George Will

design is a term that bridges theory and practice. It encompasses both a principled approach and a set of contextualized practices that are constantly adapting to circumstances. — Helen Beetham

It was Einstein's dream to discover the grand design of the universe, a single theory that explains everything. However, physicists in Einstein's day hadn't made enough progress in understanding the forces of nature for that to be a realistic goal. — Stephen Hawking

Intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory. — William A. Dembski

In the process Paul laid out a comprehensive theory of poverty, of a world designed by the elites of all nations to serve their own ends, the pieces of the design enshrined in ideologies, which erased the histories of how things came to be as they were. — Tracy Kidder

Teachers seeking to 'teach the controversy' over Darwinian evolution in today's climate will likely be met with false warnings that it is unconstitutional to say anything negative about Darwinian evolution. Students who attempt to raise questions about Darwinism, or who try to elicit from the teacher an honest answer about the status of intelligent design theory will trigger administrators' concerns about whether they stand in Constitutional jeopardy. A chilling effect on open inquiry is being felt in several states already, including Ohio. South Carolina, and Pennsylvania. [District Court] Judge Jones's message is clear: give Darwin only praise, or else face the wrath of the judiciary. — David K. DeWolf

My colleague Sen. Rick Santorum, Pennsylvania Republican, erroneously suggested that I support the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to biological evolution. That simply is not true. ... Unlike biological evolution, intelligent design is not a genuine scientific theory and, therefore, has no place in the curriculum of our nation's public school science classes. — Edward Kennedy

You must forget all your theories, all your ideas before the subject. What part of these is really your own will be expressed in your expression of the emotion awakened in you by the subject. — Henri Matisse

The legislator should keep two things constantly before his eyes: 1. The pure theory developed to its minutest details; 2. The particular condition of actual things which he designs to reform. — Wilhelm Von Humboldt

Theories cannot claim to be indestructible. They are only the plough which the ploughman uses to draw his furrow and which he has every right to discard for another one, of improved design, after the harvest. To be this ploughman, to see my labours result in the furtherance of scientific progress, was the height of my ambition, and now the Swedish Academy of Sciences has come, at this harvest, to add the most brilliant of crowns. — Paul Sabatier

As to the Divine Design, is it not an instance of incomprehensibly and infinitely marvellous Wisdom and Design to have given certain laws to matter millions of ages ago, which have surely and precisely worked out, in the long course of those ages, those effects which He from the first proposed. Mr. Darwin's theory need not then to be atheistical, be it true or not; it may simply be suggesting a larger idea of Divine Prescience and Skill. Perhaps your friend has got a surer clue to guide him than I have, who have never studied the question, and I do not [see] that 'the accidental evolution of organic beings' is inconsistent with divine design - It is accidental to us, not to God. — John Henry Newman

If the theory is confirmed by observation, it will be the successful conclusion of a search going back more than 3,000 years. We will have found the grand design. — Stephen Hawking

The contemporary design argument does not rest, however, on gaps in our knowledge but rather on the growth in our knowledge due to the revolution in molecular biology. Information theory has taught us that nature exhibits two types of order. The first type is produced by natural causes-shiny crystals, hexagonal patterns in oil, whirlpools in the bathtub. But the second type-the complex structure of the DNA molecule-is not produced by any natural processes known to experience. — Nancy Pearcey

Beautiful Evidence is about the theory and practice of analytical design. — Edward Tufte

The fact that some religious fanatics might support a theory doesn't invalidate it, anymore than the concurrence of UFO abduction cults invalidates the notion of extra-terrestrial life. — James P. Hogan

The complex order we now observe [in the universe] could *not* have been the result of any initial design built into the universe at the so-called creation. The universe preserves no record of what went on before the big bang. The Creator, if he existed, left no imprint. Thus he might as well have been nonexistent. — Victor J. Stenger

How odd that Americans, and not just their presidents, have come to think of their Constitution as something separable from the government it's supposed to constitute. In theory, it should be as binding on rulers as the laws of physics are on engineers who design bridges; in practice, its axioms have become mere options. Of course engineers don't have to take oaths to respect the law of gravity; reality gives them no choice. Politics, as we see, makes all human laws optional for politicians. — Joseph Sobran

To understand Darwin's work, you have to distinguish between his theory of descent and his theory of natural selection. THe full name of the first is the theory of descent with modification. Some call it the fact of evolution, and some call it the doctrine of evolution. — Lee Spetner

Seemingly by design, the American legal system encourages defense counsel to be as mendacious as possible. As Monroe Freedman, a legal ethicist and former dean of Hofstra Law School, has written, "The attorney is obligated to attack, if he can, the reliability or credibility of an opposing witness whom he knows to be truthful." It's an essential component of our adversarial system of justice, based on the theory that justice is best achieved not through a third-party investigation directed by an impartial judge but, instead, through vigorous disputation by the interested parties: trial by verbal combat. The — Jon Krakauer

The pattern recognition theory of mind that I articulate in this book is based on a different fundamental unit: not the neuron itself, but rather an assembly of neurons, which I estimate to number around a hundred. The wiring and synaptic strengths within each unit are relatively stable and determined genetically - that is the organization within each pattern recognition module is determined by genetic design. Learning takes place in the creation of connections between these units, not within them, and probably in the synaptic strengths of the interunit connections. — Ray Kurzweil

Physically, gardens must have boundaries. Mentally, they can reach to the limits of the known universe. The ideas that bestow such vast extent upon gardens derive from sun, earth, art, water, history, civilization, family, anything. — Tom Turner

With couture, you feel obligated to design something modern each season, but with Theyskens Theory, I don't question anything. I'm thinking of what I'd like to wear. — Olivier Theyskens