Last week I attended the Design Mind Salon with Bill Buxton (our hero) as one of its speakers. I managed to jot down some quotes by him. All of these are paraphrases but they’re good ones:
Great design does not come from a great designer or a great department. It comes from a culture.
Mos people who talk about the importance of design do not know who makes the design decisions. Most people who are making design decisions do not know they are doing so, or have the competence to do so.
If you cannot toss your ideas out, you will go nowhere.
Agility of mind and humor to come to great solutions. Play is fundamental to creative thinking and design.
To go from invention to maturity (billion dollar industry) takes 20 years on average. You don’t have to predict the future, you just need to know the last ten years.
The ideas are lying right in front of us. They are waiting to be picked up by people who see them. We need people who serve as a Geiger counter.
Think of a musician, cinematographer, artist who does not know the history of their discipline. Now find a designer.
The only way to engineer the future tomorrow is to live in it yesterday.
Smart home already exists in cars. People don’t think about this as architecture.
They see the world through different eyes and in different ways. Because they are trained to do so and they try really hard at it.
If you do not have the broadest base of experience to bing to the question, why do you expect to be better than the competition?
The Renaissance man is dead long live the Renaissance organization.
Competent designers have theory and technique not only vision. You don’t need inspiration. This is not art, this is business. Creativity can be learned and improved upon. You need to practice.