John Maeda Quotes - Page 2

Technological advances have always been driven more by a mind-set of 'I can' than 'I should' Technologists love to cram maximum functionality into their products. That's 'I can' thinking, which is driven by peer competition and market forces But this approach ignores the far more important question of how the consumer will actually use the device focus on what we should be doing, not just what we can.

A book is a human-powered film projector (complete with feature film) that advances at a speed fully customized to the viewer's mood or fancy. This rare harmony between object and user arises from the minimal skills required to manipulate a bound sequence of pages. Each piece of paper embodies a corresponding instant of time which remains frozen until liberated by the act of turning a page.

All artists yearn to struggle, when they struggle they know they're alive.

Knowledge makes everything simpler.

One of the challenges to our nation today is overcoming the notion that art is kind of a nice-to-have, when in reality art is a need-to-have.

Anyone with a computer and a design program can create a page layout. But unless you're trained in design, it won't look very good and it won't communicate very well.

Think of the computer as a spiritual space for thinking.

Apple products aren't simple technologies by any stretch, but there is a beautiful simplicity to them.

Really great products, like @nest, have #design baked in from the beginning instead of slapped on at the end.

No place in the US better exemplifies the ethos to engineer new digital technologies than Silicon Valley

I like stuff designed by dead people. The old designers. They always got it right because they didn't have to grow up with computers. All of the people that made the spoon and the dishes and the vacuum cleaner didn't have microprocessors and stuff. You could do a good design back then.

Artists change how we see the world - and that can have value in the way people do business.

Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.

Information is expanding daily. How to get it out visually is important.

The difference between closing or opening your eyes is the choice between the imagined vs real. Blinking is only human.

Corporations today, by their razor sharp focus on the 'bottom line' and quarterly earnings, have lost their ability to innovate.

Communication in every which way is everything for the leader.

Things that I can do myself, I either do by myself, or teach a willing undergraduate who doesn't know how to do those things by doing it for me. Things that I can't do myself, my graduate students should be doing.

Research universities need excellent means to communicate and express their results to regular people.

As a genre, videogames take our minds on journeys, and we can control and experience them much more interactively than passively - especially when they are well-designed.

Design provides solutions, art asks questions.

Videogames are indeed design: They're sophisticated virtual machines that echo the mechanical systems inside cars.

There is a construct in computer programming called 'the infinite loop' which enables a computer to do what no other physical machine can do - to operate in perpetuity without tiring. In the same way it doesn't know exhaustion, it doesn't know when it's wrong and it can keep doing the wrong thing over and over without tiring.

The best scientists that I've met are those that are humanists and scientists at the same time.

With regard to what is designed really well, I think people are the best-designed objects in the world. Seriously.