Ralph Caplan Quotes

Thinking about design is hard, but not thinking about it can be disastrous.

Designers shouldn’t design for museums any more than mummies should die for them.

All our media are given over to things that are better left unsaid.

Attention must be paid’ is the cardinal rule of design discipline, for the designer is above all someone who pays attention to the situation at hand.

A chair is the first thing you need when you don’t really need anything, and is therefore a peculiarly compelling symbol of civilization. For it is civilization, not survival, that requires design.

...one of hallmarks of a creative person is the ability to tolerate ambiguity, dissonance, inconsistency, things out of place. But one of the rules of a well-run corporation is that surprise is to be minimized. Yet if this rule were applied to the creative process, nothing worth reading would get written, nothing worth seeing would get painted, nothing worth living with and using would ever get designed.

It is important to notice that these badly functioning designs were praised for 'elegance.' But elegance as theoretical scientists apply it is quite different. The elegance of a mathematical formula is that it explains a phenomenon beautifully, with no parts left over. In design, elegance is more readily perceived as a property of product than of process. If we had more elegant theories, we might look to design for more than elegance.

If more designers had bad backs, we would have more good chairs.

We are … the un-proud non-possessors of objects whose chief substance is that of the transient symbol. Our Puritan fear of the love of things turns out to have been groundless after all, for we do not love things or even possess them: they pass through our lives as barium passes through the digestive tract, unassimilated, their function merely to flash signals along the way.