• There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. (Charles Hoare)
• Imitating paper on a computer screen is like tearing the wings off a 747 and using it as a bus on the highway. (Ted Nelson)
• How would a car function if it were designed like a computer? Occasionally, executing a maneuver would cause your car to stop and fail and you would have to re-install the engine, and the airbag system would say, "Are you sure?" before going off. (Katie Hafner)
• A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof was to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. (Douglas Adams)
• You can have any combination of features the Air Ministry desires, so long as you do not also require that the resulting airplane fly. (Willy Messerschmidt)
• More people have ascended bodily into heaven than have shipped great software on time. (Jim McCarthy)
• In the beginning we must simplify the subject, thus unavoidably falsifying it, and later we must sophisticate away the falsely simple beginning. (Maimonides)
• Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen. (Edward V Berard)
• One of the great enemies of design is when systems or objects become more complex than a person - or even a team of people - can keep in their heads. This is why software is generally beneath contempt. (Bran Ferren)
• A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. (John Gall)
• Invariably, if something is so complex that it requires the addition of multiple preferences or customization choices, it is probably too complex to use. (Don Norman)
• There comes a time in the history of any project when it becomes necessary to shoot the engineers and begin production. (MacUser in 1990)
• The multiple stupidities of even the latest designs, such as Microsoft’s Windows 2000 or Apple’s OS X, show either an unjustifiable ignorance of or a near-criminal avoidance of what we do know [about existing engineering methods for designing human-computer interfaces]. (Jef Raskin)
• Designers talk and think a lot like science fiction writers do, except in a much less melodramatic and histrionic way. (Bruce Sterling)
• Recognizing the need is the primary condition for design. (Charles Eames)
• All really first class designers are both artists, engineers, and men of a powerful and intolerant temper, quick to resist the least modification of the plans, energetic in fighting the least infringement upon what they regard as their own sphere of action. (Nevil Shute)
• You can only put as much intelligence in a system as was in the design engineer to begin with. (Peter Orme)
• Design adds value faster than it adds cost. (Joel Spolsky)
• At a place like IBM, there's an infinite world of products that you can create. But, too often, management would say, "Great, you big-idea guys, go go go." But then they give all the money to the people who control the revenue streams, the people with the overhead projectors and PowerPoint slides. (Ted Selker)
• When one has no character one has to apply a method. (Albert Camus)
• The most powerful designs are always the result of a continuous process of simplification and refinement. (Kevin Mullet)
• If architects worked on the same principle [as software engineering], most buildings would end up looking like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. (David Crocker)
• There is no such thing as a boring project. There are only boring executions. (Irene Etzkorn)
• No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I'm after is just a mediocre brain, something like the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. (Alan Turing)
• A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others. (Ayn Rand)
• Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic. (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
• Building large applications is still really difficult. Making them serve an organisation well for many years is almost impossible. (Malcolm P Atkinson)
• We want to make a machine that will be proud of us. (Danny Hillis)
• If our designs are failing due to the constant rain of changing requirements, it is our designs that are at fault. We must somehow find a way to make our designs resilient to such changes and protect them from rotting. (Robert C Martin)
• If you cannot grok the overall structure of a program while taking a shower, you are not ready to code it. (Richard Pattis)
• Designers must do two seemingly contradictory things at the same time: They must design for perfection, and they must design as though errors are inevitable. And they must do the second without compromising the first. (Bob Colwell)
• The two main design principles of the NeXT machine appear to be revenge and spite. (Don Lancaster)
• When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only of how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong. (R Buckminster Fuller)
• Tools that are meant to support serious, concentrated effort, where the task is well specified and the approach relatively well understood are best served by designs that emphasize function and minimize irrelevancies. (Don Norman)
• It's OK to figure out murder mysteries, but you shouldn't need to figure out code. You should be able to read it. (Steve McConnell)
• The edge of chaos is the constantly shifting battle zone between stagnation and anarchy, the one place where a complex system can be spontaneous, adaptive, and alive. (M Mitchell Waldrop)
• Technical skill is mastery of complexity, while creativity is mastery of simplicity. (E Christopher Zeeman)
• Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. (Clement Mok)
• Those who admire the massive, rigid bone structures of dinosaurs should remember that jellyfish still enjoy their very secure ecological niche. (Beau Sheil)
• Design and programming are human activities; forget that and all is lost. (Bjarne Stroustrup)
• It occurred to me this morning that many system design flaws can be traced to unwarrantedly anthropomorphizing the user. (Steven Maker)
• Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way. (Edward de Bono)
• If programs had multiple ways to think, then they wouldn’t so often get stuck –- because they could change their points of view. (Marvin Minsky)
• The really good idea is always traceable back quite a long way, often to a not very good idea which sparked off another idea that was only slightly better, which somebody else misunderstood in such a way that they then said something which was really rather interesting. (John Cleese)
• It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious. (Alfred North Whitehead)
• Great design will not sell an inferior product, but it will enable a great product to achieve its maximum potential. (Thomas Watson Jr)
• Architect: Someone who knows the difference between that which could be done and that which should be done. (Larry McVoy)
• Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory. (Leonardo da Vinci)
• Much of the Web is like an anthill built by ants on LSD. (Jakob Nielsen)
• The difference between a great design and a lousy one is in the meshing of the thousand details that either fit or don't, and the spirit of the passionate intellect that has tied them together, or tried. (Ted Nelson)
• There's a better way to do it. Find it. (Thomas Edison)
• How good the design is doesn't matter near as much as whether the design is getting better or worse. If it is getting better, day by day, I can live with it forever. If it is getting worse, I will die. (Kent Beck)
• In a room full of top software designers, if any two of them agree, that's a majority. (Bill Curtis)
• Form follows function - that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union. (Frank Lloyd Wright)
• Out of intense complexities intense simplicities emerge. (Winston Churchil)
• The mathematical sciences particularly exhibit order, symmetry, and limitation; and these are the greatest forms of the beautiful. (Aristotle)
• An application that does something really great that people really want to do can be pathetically unusable, and it will still be a hit. And an application can be the easiest thing in the world to use, but if it doesn't do anything anybody wants, it will flop. (Joel Spolsky)
• Markets historically evolve past commoditization to value style and special features. (Nicholas Carr)
• Good engineering doesn't consist of random acts of heroism. (Harry Robinson)
• Quality isn't something you lay on top of subjects and objects like tinsel on a Christmas tree. (Robert Pirsig)
• Absolute certainty about the fail-proofness of a design can never be attained, for we can never be certain that we have been exhaustive in asking questions about its future. (Henry Petroski)
• No amount of genius can overcome a preoccupation with detail. (Marion Levy)
• A specification, design, procedure, or test plan that will not fit on one page of 8.5-by-11 inch paper cannot be understood. (Mark Ardis)
• Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. (Herbert Simon)
• Crash programs fail because they are based on the theory that, with nine women pregnant, you can get a baby a month. (Wernher von Braun)
• You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new. (Steve Jobs)
• One of the things that tools can do is to help bad designers create ghastly designs much more quickly than they ever could in the past. (Grady Booch)
• The understanding that underlies the right decision grows out of the clash and conflict of opinions and out of the serious consideration of competing alternatives. (Peter Drucker)
• Plan to throw one away. You will do that, anyway. Your only choice is whether to try to sell the throwaway to customers. (Frederick Brooks)
• If you plan to throw one away, you will throw away two. (Craig Zerouni)
• Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice. (Christopher Alexander)
• Things intended to be used under stressful situations require a lot more care, with much more attention to detail. (Don Norman)
• I'm not schooled in the science of human factors, but I suspect surprise is not an element of a robust user interface. (Chip Rosenthal)
• A well-designed and humane interface does not need to be split into beginner and expert subsystems. (Jef Raskin)
• Never, ever, ever let systems-level engineers do human interaction design unless they have displayed a proven secondary talent in that area. Their opinion of what represents good human-computer interaction tends to be a bit off-track. (Bruce Tognazzini)
• Graphic design will save the world right after rock and roll does. (David Carson)
