"One of the things that’s interesting about design [is that] there’s a danger, particularly in this industry, to focus on product attributes that are easy to talk about. You go back 10 years, and people wanted to talk about product attributes that you could measure with a number. So they would talk about hard drive size, because it was incontrovertible that 10 was a bigger number than 5, and maybe in the case of hard drives that’s a good thing. Or you could talk about price because there’s a number there. But there are a lot of product attributes that don’t have those sorts of measures. Product attributes that are more emotive and less tangible. But they’re really important. There’s a lot of stuff that’s really important that you can’t distill down to a number. And I think one of the things with design is that when you look at an object you make many many decisions about it, not consciously, and I think one of the jobs of a designer is that you’re very sensitive to trying to understand what goes on between seeing something and filling out your perception of it. You know we all can look at the same object, but we will all perceive it in a very unique way. It means something different to each of us. Part of the job of a designer is to try to understand what happens between physically seeing something and interpreting it. I think that sort of striving for simplicity is not a style. It’s an approach and a philosophy. I think it’s about authenticity and being honest. Not just taking something crappy and styling the outside in an arbitrary disconnected way."

"A modern paradox is that it’s simpler to create complex interfaces because it’s so complex to simplify them."

"It’s a simple question really, but I’ve always found myself having to fight to make just basic functionality a priority. I’ve spent years making what I call Beautiful Pieces of Shit—designs that look lovely but are barely usable and/or useful. And it’s sad to see otherwise wonderful content rendered entirely useless for the sake of “design."

"Designing without a focus on solving a specific pain point will result in a product with no clear function or purpose—a “solution looking for a problem”. If there is no end goal, you can just add feature after feature to “add value”, and end up with cumbersome and unusable interface."

"We are lonely but fearful of intimacy. Digital connections and the sociable robot may offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. We expect more from technology and Less from each other."

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The opportunity of a lifetime is to pick yourself. Quit waiting to get picked; quit waiting for someone to give you permission; quit waiting for someone to say you are officially qualified and pick yourself. It doesn’t mean you have to be an entrepreneur or a freelancer, but it does mean you stand up and say, “I have something to say. I know how to do something. I’m doing it.

~ Seth Godin

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"Always be a first rate version of yourself and not a second rate version of someone else."

"Choose your corner, pick away at it carefully, intensely and to the best of your ability and that way you might change the world."

"I like building things that nobody expected to be built, and I’m not really excited by the idea of taking something that already exists and making it slightly better."