All posts filed under “Friday quote

Buckminster Fuller on Design with Intent

Buckminster Fuller on Design with Intent

Buckminster Fuller, talking to the New Yorker in 1966, quoted in this article by Elizabeth Kolbert: “I made up my mind . . . that I would never try to reform man–that’s much too difficult. What I would do was to try to modify the […]

Friday quote: Friction

Friday quote: Friction

“If the point of contact between the product and the people becomes a point of friction, then the Industrial Designer has failed.” Henry Dreyfuss, Designing for People, 1955 Cognitive friction is one thing, and generally a result rather than a deliberate strategy; process friction is […]

Friday quote: Writer’s Block

Friday quote: Writer’s Block

Scott Adams (via Seth Godin): I think writer’s block is when you say to yourself, “I could write something, but it wouldn’t be good enough.” There’s no such thing as a complete inability to write a sentence. He’s right, of course: it’s the fear of […]

Friday quote: Super-Cannes by J G Ballard

Friday quote: Super-Cannes by J G Ballard

J G Ballard, Super-Cannes, chapter 29: Thousands of people live and work here without making a single decision about right and wrong. The moral order is engineered into their lives along with the speed limits and the security systems. Re-reading Ballard’s excellent Super-Cannes, since the […]

Friday quote: Precedents

Friday quote: Precedents

It is remarkable… how often thinking for oneself will lead us to conclusions written about before we were born. From a post by Vera Bass, ‘Teaching requires learning’, 6th November 2006. Many people have probably also said this, but that’s the point, pretty much.

Friday quote: Fashion & convention

Friday quote: Fashion & convention

L.J.K. Setright, the late motoring writer and commentator, self-taught mechanical engineer and all-round Renaissance Man, once wrote: Fashion is a terrible fetter; convention, since it lasts longer, is even worse. This was in an issue of Car, when it was still any good. Setright wrote […]

Friday quote: Precedents (the flipside)

Friday quote: Precedents (the flipside)

As a flipside, perhaps, to the quote on precedents from a couple of weeks ago: If there is something really cool, and you can’t understand why somebody hasn’t done it before, it’s because you haven’t done it yourself. (From Lion Kimbro‘s fascinating How to Make […]