Products, Design, Software, Life

[kvnsmth]

It should be painfully obvious that learning how to program a computer has no direct connection to any high form of enlightenment—no more than learning scientific technique, mathematics or engineering. And yet each of these can be vehicles for deep insights into the much larger worlds that the human mind is capable of understanding.

It’s worth your time to read the entire essay by Alan Kay: http://worrydream.com/EnlightenedImaginationForCitizens/

[kvnsmth]

An artist at work upon a painting must be two people, not one. He must function and act as two people all the time and in several ways. On the one hand, the artist is the imaginer and the producer. But he is also the critic, and here is a critic of such inexorable standards.

Ben Shahn, The Shape of Content

[kvnsmth]

Poetry is a soul inaugurating a form.

Pierre Jean Jouve

[kvnsmth]

Architecture begins with the making of a room.

Louis Kahn

[kvnsmth]

where everything is ephemeral, novelty comes to be overvalued and mistaken for art; so that design is reduced to fashion pure and simple

David Pye in The Nature and Art of Workmanship

[kvnsmth]

As is well known (or should be), if an argument persuades by its simplicity, usually someone has done their homework: the most economical design may conceal the most arduous preparation.

Norman Potter in What is a designer

[kvnsmth]

It is impossible to theorize about the ideal of art. In real art theory does not precede practice, but follows her. Any theoretical scheme will be lacking in the essential of creation—the inner desire for expression—which cannot be determined.

Wassily Kandinsky

[kvnsmth]

Mathematical work does not proceed along the narrow logical path of truth to truth to truth, but bravely or gropingly follows deviations through the surrounding marshland of propositions which are neither simply and wholly true nor simply and wholly false.

Seymour Papert in Mindstorms

[kvnsmth]

The perfect customer is dissatisfied but hopeful, uninterested in serious personal development, highly habituated to the television, working full-time, earning a fair amount, indulging during their free time, and somehow just getting by.

http://www.trueactivist.com/your-lifestyle-has-already-been-designed-the-real-reason-for-the-forty-hour-workweek/

[kvnsmth]

I would say the priority is that we learn how to care and we learn how to fail and that we're prepared to screw up the work that we've done and throw it away even if we don't know what we're going to do instead.

http://www.dezeen.com/2014/11/13/design-education-tragic-says-jonathan-ive-apple/

[kvnsmth]

By the way, what have you done that’s so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?

Steve Jobs

[kvnsmth]

In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now).

Zero to One by Peter Thiel

[kvnsmth]

It’s taken me all my life to learn what not to play.

Dizzy Gillespie

[kvnsmth]

You can't kill email! It's the cockroach of the Internet, and I mean that as a compliment. This resilience is a good thing.

Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

[kvnsmth]

Design like you're right; listen like you're wrong.

John Lilly

[kvnsmth]

There are a lot of problems out there that can and should be solved, and not just because it'll be great for you, but because it’ll be great for everyone. Once you have this premise — once you’ve found the right thing to do — the strategy is to first know what you don’t know, the tactic is to grind, and the value is to remember: there are plenty of places to innovate.

There’s a .00006% Chance of Building a Billion Dollar Company: How This Man Did It

[kvnsmth]

We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down different paths.

Walt Disney