A chair is the first thing you need when you don’t really need anything, and is therefore a peculiarly compelling symbol of civilization. For it is civilization, not survival, that requires design.
Ralph CaplanTags: civilization design industrial-design
Thinking about design is hard, but not thinking about it can be disastrous.
Ralph CaplanTags: design
Attention must be paid’ is the cardinal rule of design discipline, for the designer is above all someone who pays attention to the situation at hand.
Ralph CaplanTags: design
All our media are given over to things that are better left unsaid.
Ralph CaplanSmall, noncomparative, highly labeled data sets usually belong in tables.
Edward R. TufteTags: design
Allowing artist-illustrators to control the design and content of statistical graphics is almost like allowing typographers to control the content, style, and editing of prose.
Edward R. TufteTags: design data-representation visual-display
A Puritan twist in our nature makes us think that anything good for us must be twice as good if it's hard to swallow. Learning Greek and Latin used to play the role of character builder, since they were considered to be as exhausting and unrewarding as digging a trench in the morning and filling it up in the afternoon. It was what made a man, or a woman -- or more likely a robot -- of you. Now math serves that purpose in many schools: your task is to try to follow rules that make sense, perhaps, to some higher beings; and in the end to accept your failure with humbled pride. As you limp off with your aching mind and bruised soul, you know that nothing in later life will ever be as difficult.
What a perverse fate for one of our kind's greatest triumphs! Think how absurd it would be were music treated this way (for math and music are both excursions into sensuous structure): suffer through playing your scales, and when you're an adult you'll never have to listen to music again. And this is mathematics we're talking about, the language in which, Galileo said, the Book of the World is written. This is mathematics, which reaches down into our deepest intuitions and outward toward the nature of the universe -- mathematics, which explains the atoms as well as the stars in their courses, and lets us see into the ways that rivers and arteries branch. For mathematics itself is the study of connections: how things ideally must and, in fact, do sort together -- beyond, around, and within us. It doesn't just help us to balance our checkbooks; it leads us to see the balances hidden in the tumble of events, and the shapes of those quiet symmetries behind the random clatter of things. At the same time, we come to savor it, like music, wholly for itself. Applied or pure, mathematics gives whoever enjoys it a matchless self-confidence, along with a sense of partaking in truths that follow neither from persuasion nor faith but stand foursquare on their own. This is why it appeals to what we will come back to again and again: our **architectural instinct** -- as deep in us as any of our urges.
Tags: science inspirational education wonder math design mathematics
Modernism isn't a design ethos any more, it's an economy of scale, and a marketing tool to sell the ordinary as something special, the sexless as erotic. A technological device without a specific, personalized identity has a subtext: it asserts the value of instrumentality. Its design is a reflection of its role... The anonymity of these objects is part of what they are: interchangeable commodities whose uniqueness in so far as they possess any is created by what is done with them. Function is an identity. And that identity is something we are encouraged to incorporate into our perception of self, that anonymity is proposed as something to emulate. Whimsy and uniqueness are indulgences.
Nick HarkawayTags: life technology anonymity personality design uniqueness personalization
Freedom is more than just a patriotic concept; it is the purest intent of our design. Be you. Be free. Be nice.
Steve MaraboliTags: freedom patriotic free design intent
To have a style is to be stuck.
Jonah LehrerTags: design
« first previous
Page 10 of 16.
next last »
Data privacy
Imprint
Contact
Diese Website verwendet Cookies, um Ihnen die bestmögliche Funktionalität bieten zu können.