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.
My goal is to omit everything superfluous so that the essential is shown to best possible advantage.
Content informs design; design without content is decoration.
Throughout this book, we've been evangelizing simplicity, but ironically, the practice of simplicity is not simple. It is easy to build a bulky design by adding layer upon layer of navigation and features; it's much more difficult to create simple, graceful designs. Paring designs to essential elements while maintaining elegance and functionality requires courage and discipline.
Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it's 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.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.