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.
Designers provide ways into—and out of—the flood of words by breaking up text into pieces and offering shortcuts and alternate routes through masses of information. (...) Although many books define the purpose of typography as enhancing the readability of the written word, one of design’s most humane functions is, in actuality, to help readers avoid reading.
Design should not dominate things, should not dominate people. It should help people. That's its role.
Confusion and clutter are failures of design, not attributes of information. And so the point is to find design strategies that reveal detail and complexity - rather than to fault the data for an excess of complication. Or, worse, to fault viewers for a lack of understanding.
Content informs design; design without content is decoration.
Design needs to be plugged into human behavior. Design dissolves in behavior.
Design principle: Take things away until the design breaks, then put that last thing back in.
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