Designers stand between revolutions and everyday life. They’re able to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and society and convert those changes into objects and ideas that people can understand.
Interpretation
Designers translate complex societal and technological changes into accessible ideas and objects.
This quote by Paola Antonelli highlights the crucial role of designers in bridging the gap between significant advancements in technology, science, and society, and the everyday experiences of people. By interpreting and simplifying these transformations, designers help make complex ideas tangible and relatable, thus facilitating a better understanding of the world around us.
In practice
A design conference where the importance of designers in technology is discussed.
People think that design is styling. Design is not style. It's not about giving shape to the shell and not giving a damn about the guts. Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need and beauty to produce something that the world didn't know it was missing.
Designers may be the true intellectuals of the future.
While an artist can choose whether or not to be responsive and responsible towards other human beings, by definition a designer must be.
We live today not in the digital, not in the physical, but in the kind of minestrone that our mind makes of the two.
Form must never trump function. Some objects are made to look so smooth, you don't know where to pick them up or how to turn them on. If I'm designing a garlic press or cheese grater, I need my hand to fit comfortably on it. I like to know, instinctively, how to use it.
If you remember the shape of your spoon at lunch, it has to be the wrong shape. The spoon and the letter are tools; one to take food from the bowl, the other to take information off the page... When it is a good design, the reader has to feel comfortable because the letter is both banal and beautiful.
We won't do something different for different's sake. Designers cave in to marketing, to the corporate agenda, which is sort of, 'Oh, it looks like the last one; can't we make it look different?' Well no, there's no reason to.
Design principle: Take things away until the design breaks, then put that last thing back in.
Great design will not sell an inferior product, but it will enable a great product to achieve its maximum potential.
It is not how much empty space there is, but rather how it is used. It is not how much information there is, but rather how effectively it is arranged.
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