Design Thought Leader

If a character is speaking, I just say the words to myself very quickly and almost always write them down with no corrections, which is completely the opposite of what I do when I’m narrating in third-person—I write and write and write. Actually, I’d like to get some of the looseness I have in the dialogue into the narrative. I’m very formal in the narrative… because I’m English, I think, and we have very formal ways of writing. But I like that looseness.

Dialogue shouldn’t be writerly. I try to keep the natural rhythm of people’s speech and not give it a literary texture, but it’s not always easy. You’re trying to force the plot forward, so you are going to give it a literary texture just to make the thing work. But I prefer natural dialogue if I can get it.

Zadie Smith
Novelist

Creating anything is hard. It’s a cliché thing to say, but every time you start a job, you just don’t know anything. I mean, I can break something down, but ultimately I don’t know anything when I start work on a new movie. You start stabbing out, and you make a mistake, and it’s not right, and then you try again and again. The key is you have to commit. And that’s hard because you have to find what it is you are committing to.

Philip Seymour Hoffman
Actor

I’m not particularly good at making things. But slowly I’ve gotten a little bit better. And in a certain way I like the challenge of not being good at making something. I like that it’s a lot of work, that it’s a struggle. There’s something very satisfying about almost getting it right.

Kiki Smith
Artist

Design is no longer just about form anymore but is a method of thinking that can let you to see around corners. And the high tech breakthroughs that do count today are not about speed and performance but about collaboration, conversation and co-creation.

Bruce Nussbaum
Editor, BusinessWeek’s innovation and design coverage

Here is one of the few effective keys to the design problem—the ability of the designer to recognize as many of the constraints as possible—the willingness and enthusiasm for working within these constraints. Constraints of price, of size, of strength, of balance, of surface, of time and so forth.

Charles Eames
Designer

As designers, we have a great responsibility. I believe designers should eliminate the unnecessary. That means eliminating everything that is modish because this kind of thing is only short-lived. But a company like Braun can prove that a product that is no longer up to date can still be used. They can be very proud that nobody is throwing them away. I know a lot of people who have still got these products.

Dieter Rams
Industrial Designer

Designers can try to experience the user’s situation as directly as he or she can, while acknowledging the limitations. But direct experience of another kind is crucial to any design—namely, direct experience with the material used or the process of making something.

Although, it’s not user-centered, I wonder if that’s not another aspect of empathy. To quote the late Saul Bass, ‘Every design problem has a craft basis.’ Describing his widely acclaimed graphic title sequence for the film The Man with the Golden Arm, Bass said, ‘If I had not myself fooled with cut paper, I would not have gotten the symbol.’ When the architect Louis Kahn told his students, ‘The brick wants to be an arch,’ I don’t believe they took him literally. They knew what he meant even if the brick did not. Designers always relate personally to the stuff they make things from. The 19th-century critic John Ruskin coined the term ‘pathetic fallacy’ to describe the predisposition of painters and poets to attribute human qualities to inanimate objects. Designers naturally do it all the time, but in their case, it is neither pathetic nor fallacious.

Ralph Caplan
Author

I prefer just to think of design as expression of ideas, and as language. It’s a way of experiencing the world. What I’m interested in is the idea of pleasure, desire, uselessness—of walking through the world with your eyes open. Not cause and effect, but sensation.

This is both an approach to doing work and a way of experiencing the world, designed and undesigned. It’s a liberating approach, because it removes the need to be ‘right’. It’s about looking at design in a democratic way: as something we share rather than something a few people do. A piece of design is the expression of an idea. It’s not a solution.

Mark Thomson
Graphic Designer and Art Director