Design Feast Series: Quotes

“Our clients need to believe in what we are selling and to believe in us. From a graphic design perspective, the onus is on us to make our visual communications clear, impactful and meaningful.

It took much patience and a few years to build trust among my clients, both in the value of good graphic design and in me. I remember one late night standing in front of three 4 x 8-foot presentation boards intended to sell our healthcare services with their charts, graphs and half-completed renderings, when the design leader quipped to me, ‘Graphic design is hard to explain.’ I shot him a glance and replied, ‘It is even harder to believe in.’

In a graphic design studio you are awarded jobs based on your experience, reputation, portfolio and salesmanship. Clients want to trust you because they are paying you, and if they don’t trust you, they will change your design. With in-house design, though, there exists the unique opportunity to dive deeper into the day-to-day business with the clients and upper management and share their insight and experiences. Most of us have a client-facing job where every day we play the designer, account manager and partner. If we are good at it, we are awarded with the holy grail of trust, and the rapport and support that trust brings.”

Lisa Gainor, Creative Director at Hello Designers

“Design, to me, is the search for efficiency. Efficiency in conveying a message, efficiency of form. In this way I see some of my own work falling into the category of design, while some of my other work falls under the umbrella of illustration. With the more illustrative pieces my primary goal is to create something beautiful or striking in a visceral sense. These goals remain intact when I create a purely design-driven piece, but there is the added goal of minimalism and efficiency which constrains the process and limits the content. It is these constraints that force us as designers to reveal the core of the idea we are trying to express and to seek the most direct route to it. In this way, all of the periphery and excess of illustration and fine art can be shed to expose the roots of visual communication and express them in a concise and instantly understandable form. When I see something that embodies these ideals it is always very moving, these are the things that drive me to create.”

Scott Hansen, Artist and Musician

“I approach every project systematically, and develop a set of rules that will help me make something consistent and interesting. With a typeface I’m considering all the angles, lines and transitions which will create a kit of guiding principles that direct every decision. The same is true in a logotype or a diagram or a publication, I try to develop a system that is robust and interesting enough to carry all the parts of the design in a successful manner. …

You have to stay busy. If you’ve got a day job and you’re not doing freelance or personal projects at night, you’re not doing enough. If you’re working for yourself, and not working on the weekends, then you’re basically standing still. Experience and a solid body of work takes time to accumulate, and there’s only one way to get there.”

Nicholas Felton, Designer at Megafone and Co-Founder of Daytum

“Working in the entertainment industry is really fun (sometimes it doesn’t even feel like a job), but to get here, you have to put in thousands of hours of hard work, blood and sweat. There are no secrets or ‘magic’ buttons to push. Focus on the fundamentals and don’t get caught up on superficial stuff. The latest versions of Photoshop or the coolest MAC/PC are not going to solve your problems. Put away the excuses and the urge to always have the newest things—instead, just work hard.”

Feng Zhu, Designer and Founder of FZD School of Design in Singapore

“Creative Good had a difficult time, like a lot of companies did, in 2001 when we laid off almost the entire company and were not doing so well.

I took some time off because I was in need of a sabbatical. When I came back from driving around the country for a few months, I had this germ of an idea, that I wanted to start a conference that was not about customer experience and business, which I knew would remain the consulting focus.

But I wanted a conference that was about good experience. Customer experience is important. I think it’s a good thing to help out companies be more effective and efficient in what they do. But really, customer experience work or user experience work, is a small subset of this much larger, much more diverse and interesting world of thought, ideas and people that I call ‘good experience.’

Again, business is part of it but so is art and so is urban design and so is performance and so is writing. There are any number of ways or places to find good experience in this world.

My idea behind Gel coming back from the road trip was look; if we can get people together who are passionate about good experience—no matter what their job is—then they’ll be able to take those patterns and those ideas back to whatever they do in their work or in their lives.

Of course I was hoping the user experience community would turn out because they would probably understand it immediately, better than most. I was surprised to see that a lot of people outside the user experience world started coming to the events also.”

Mark Hurst, Founder of Creative Good and Good Experience Live (GEL) Conference

“Acting teaches me so much about theater. I played George in ‘Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ in Atlanta. That’s a play I have known intimately my whole life. But until you really crawl inside of it and see how it works, it’s not part of you. I know I’m a better playwright as a result of acting.”

Tracy Letts, Playwright and Actor

“The ubiquity of cell phones and PDA devices allow for many more innovative and convenient solutions to the problem of providing way-finding clarity within spaces that are becoming more dynamic, fluid and multi-purpose. The iPhone and similar devices represent a massive untapped area of potential for communication designers. And as ‘experience’ seems to be an area of interest for the contemporary consumer, the physical act of using a PDA to access information while the user is located within hot zones and networked areas allows for a heightened brand experience through the simple touch of a button and lightning fast feedback. We propose that experience be taken much more seriously by companies, organizations and designers, as the dynamic that it fosters between user and content provider could greatly impact brand awareness and form tighter bonds between consumers and manufacturers. All in, mobility and access to information are maximized for the user, while unsightly public signage is minimized. And as an aid to architecture and public space, in order to allow it to be all that it is capable of, digital technologies and wireless devices should serve as the connection between places and people intent on finding them, networked together through constant communication and feedback.”

Jayson Zaleski, Designer and Writer of Kolor

“…innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem. It’s ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea.

And it comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We’re always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it's only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.”

Steve Jobs, Co-Founder of Apple

“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, Author

“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 of 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

“I have never properly regarded myself as an artist. In fact, I have been taught to scoff at the idea that anybody could make a living by doing what they like. Life, in my parents’ worldview, is a process of sustained suffering, whereby the successful reap the rewards of their anguish in the form of BMWs and Caribbean cruises. Artists suffer for their craft. Like Kafka’s archetype, they starve themselves to death in the pursuit of misbegotten visions of transcendence. Art is something you do to get yourself into college, not what you rely on to pay the bills.

During a year off from Princeton, I worked as a sales executive for a mass distributor of blank DVDs. You know that person you want to tell to go shoot themselves when they call trying to sell you something you don’t want? That was me. I had accounts ranging from a Brazilian bootlegger to a belligerent drunk who would yell at me for an hour before buying anything. Aside from teaching me how to sell a B-grade product, the job was quite meaningless. The only saving grace was that my boss wanted the company’s website redesigned. I went to Barnes & Noble, bought myself a book on web design and created what I thought was a masterpiece. In retrospect, it was terrible, but from that moment on, I’ve been hooked on graphic design. Unable to draw or paint to save my life, I found myself slowly capable of using Photoshop as my canvas and my laptop touchpad as my brush.

At Princeton, I spend about five nights a week making or editing posters for the Student Design Agency. Like Kafka’s hunger artist, I am a slave to graphic design because I do not know anything else more fulfilling. I know it may seem pathetic, but setting type on a poster in a perfectly aligned way or creating the ideal visual for an event poster seriously makes me happy. I work with artists and visionaries whose talents far exceed my own, and I despair when I realize how stunningly mediocre I am at something I love so much.”

Andy Chen, Designer

“Put simply, in order for ‘design thinking’ to be effective (i.e. make the transition from abstract theory or philosophy to a meaningful process of adding value), it has to be applied or limited to a specific relevant context. This might sound incredibly obvious, but my own experience and some of the intellectual discussions recently in the blogosphere indicate that a lot of designers are reluctant to pragmatically constrain the scope or ambition of their thinking. It is this reluctance and the spiraling intellectual gymnastics that follow that leads to ‘design thinking’ becoming esoteric or sounding overly ‘expert’ to novices or non-designers.

Design comes from the latin word ‘designato’—‘to mark out’, thus marking out the boundary or scope of a design problem. To focus creativity has always been a fundamental part of ‘design thinking’ or the design process, perhaps even the fundamental part.

Continued reflection and discussion on the design process and its terminology is particularly important in a new discipline such as service design, however, when it comes to engaging others we also have to contextualise how our ‘design thinking’ is actually going to make things better for people.”

Fergus Bisset, Design Researcher

“Morale is key in design. I’m surprised people don’t talk more about it. One of my first drawing teachers told me: if you’re bored when you’re drawing something, the drawing will look boring. For example, suppose you have to draw a building, and you decide to draw each brick individually. You can do this if you want, but if you get bored halfway through and start making the bricks mechanically instead of observing each one, the drawing will look worse than if you had merely suggested the bricks.

Building something by gradually refining a prototype is good for morale because it keeps you engaged. In software, my rule is: always have working code. If you’re writing something that you’ll be able to test in an hour, then you have the prospect of an immediate reward to motivate you. The same is true in the arts, and particularly in oil painting. Most painters start with a blurry sketch and gradually refine it. If you work this way, then in principle you never have to end the day with something that actually looks unfinished. Indeed, there is even a saying among painters: ‘A painting is never finished, you just stop working on it.’ This idea will be familiar to anyone who has worked on software.

Morale is another reason that it’s hard to design something for an unsophisticated user. It’s hard to stay interested in something you don’t like yourself. To make something good, you have to be thinking, ‘wow, this is really great,’ not ‘what a piece of shit; those fools will love it.’

Design means making things for humans. But it’s not just the user who’s human. The designer is human too.”

Paul Graham, Essayist, Programmer, Programming Language Designer

“When we’re all put on this earth. We start out as visual people; language comes later, as a coding learned along the way. As you go through the education process, early on you’re more likely to look at pictures in books and learn visually—you take it all in, you see everything. Then as you begin to code things in words, it makes everything more linear and specific. At some point, within our education system, it seems like we shift from a balance of right and left hand brain, to being very left brain. The consequence of this is, if you go through all the important books they are really image free, they’re all words. But designers keep looking at the whole picture. I think this is the reason why designers are so welcome in the boardrooms of corporations. Businesspeople have been kind of brainwashed out of solving problems in anything other than a linear approach. But sometimes, we need both sides of the brain to solve problems. Which is why I find that there are times I can go into a boardroom with guys who have degrees from 12 universities I could never get into, and help them look at a problem in a new way. Once the problem is described, the designer is more likely to say, ‘Well, did you look at this? How about doing it this way?’ It's about not adhering to a set of restrictions that have defined how you think in business. Designers don’t follow that same book of rules.”

Kit Hinrichs, Partner of Pentagram

“I would like to write a novel. I would like to write fiction about design. I am very interested in writing and exploring the medium of writing in relation to design. I think that would be my fantasy project. I love Maira Kalman. I love her book that just came out, ‘The Principles of Uncertainty’. It’s her beautiful paintings combined with her written memoirs and thoughts about the world. She’s an amazing artist. She’s a real hero to me. And I would love to do a book. I wouldn’t do something poetic like that, but I would do something more funny and about life. That would be a dream project.

At this point in my career, I could do such a book if I wanted, because I could always publish it myself. The challenge is doing these things and having them reach an audience. It’s very important to me not to do projects that are self indulgent, and I think often design authorship is very self indulgent. It’s whatever is somebody’s pet obsession, and for me it’s very important to connect to an audience.”

Ellen Lupton, Designer, Writer, Curator at Cooper-Hewitt of National Design Museum

“Be a continuous feedback loop. That means continuous input: reading books and blogs, attending talks and conferences, using the medium you design for. It also means continuous output: writing books and blogs, speaking at conferences, designing.”

Luke Wroblewski, Interaction Designer and Writer

“A while ago I was lucky enough to go and see Erik Spiekermann give a lecture. Part of his talk was about his redesign of The Economist magazine. He mentioned that one of the primary reasons for the redesign was that The Economist thought their design was too heavy. The content was difficult to read. In newspaper design, which has so many parallels with web design, information is dense. Sometimes, as in web design, it’s difficult to add white space because the content makes it hard to do so. Newspapers often deal with this by using a typeface for the body, which is quite light and has plenty of white space within, and around, the characters. This was part of Erik’s solution for the redesign of The Economist. He redesigned the typeface slightly, whilst retaining the quirkiness of the original. He added more whitespace to the individual characters. He set the type slightly smaller I believe, with more leading. All of this was adding micro white space to the design. The overall result was subtle. The content was more legible and the overall feeling of the magazine was lighter, yet there was still the same amount of content.

I learnt from Erik that day that, in order to achieve a lightness and an increase in legibility in a design, and this especially applies to the web, you don’t have to look at the design at a macro level. Looking at the space between the tiny stuff, at the micro level, can have a big impact on the effectiveness of a design.”

Mark Boulton, Web Designer

“In 1992 I made my first study tour to the educational project of Reggio Emilia, N.Italy. I thrilled to the way that this community had, over five decades, developed extraordinary schools for young children. Every aspect, including design, grows out of close observation of children and understanding about how we learn. They refer to their approach as ‘permanent research’ and I find this constantly inspiring and challenging. They also regularly collaborate with the Domus Academy in Milan.

For the past ten years I have collaborated with educators who are committed to re-conceptualising schools and schooling. Each design project becomes part of my ongoing action research to tease out the relationship between children, learning and design. One of the most enjoyable and rewarding aspects is working closely with young people of all ages—infants to secondary. Children can be so insightful and imaginative; they are also the harshest critics and the most appreciative ‘clients’.”

Mary Featherston, Designer

“Empathy—the driving force behind good listening—is the number one requirement for anyone who wants to create a good experience. Not a long list of methods, not a scholarly knowledge of one’s niche field—but empathy. Anyone can learn a method; but people who can listen, can pay attention, can see the experience from someone else's perspective, are rare and valuable.”

Mark Hurst, Founder of Creative Good and Good Experience

“Perhaps that’s why mystery, now more than ever, has special meaning. Because it’s the anomaly, the glaring affirmation that the Age of Immediacy has a meaningful downside. Mystery demands that you stop and consider—or, at the very least, slow down and discover. It's a challenge to get there yourself, on its terms, not yours.

The point is, we should never underestimate process. The experience of the doing really is everything. The ending should be the end of that experience, not the experience itself.

So, if you’re still reading, I say please: Dig.”

J. J. Abrams, Film and Television Writer, Producer, Director

“I like to wait for the noise in the brain to recede and to have a better relationship to my unconscious. Any one who spends time with young people know that you can’t fake a play. There’s real play. Then there’s fake play. And when young people are fake playing, you see it immediately. I think that the brain is really uniquely organized to detect and distinguish between the two.”

Junot Díaz, Author

“Everyone does have a story, sure, but it’s not necessarily a story that should be told on the radio. It’s important to know when there’s nothing interesting, truly interesting, in your tape, and move on. This is where playing your tape for other people and getting an honest reaction can be really helpful. Killing your story is nothing to be ashamed of. I figure, if I’m not killing at least a third of the interviews I do for the radio show, we’re not taking enough chances. Killing stories is just part of the process of finding great stories.

If one interview doesn’t work, try another, and another. Follow the things that interest you and attract you. Amuse yourself. Keep getting more tape until luck kicks in.

Luck will always kick in.”

Ira Glass, Host and Producer of public radio and television show “This American Life”

“Ideas can come from anywhere and it starts from that idea. Then it’s about building a prototype. Can you build something that really illustrates what technology you’re going to use. How are you going to create innovation out of that? How are you going to capture the innovation and the attention of the users and really meet their needs? Taking that prototype, then building out a team around it and really productionizing it. Then it becomes the fun part of the fit-and-finish of the details: How does it look? Is each pixel just right and just so? Almost like producing a movie, making sure that the product walks out the door the way you want it, and also not doing that too much. Because a big part of our innovation process is iteration. Try something. Get a lot of feedback. Try something new. Really bird-walking along that path to what the user really wants by launching early and launching often.”

Marissa Mayer, V.P. of Search Product and User Experience at Google

“You have to shape your career on a day to day basis. I mean you could just take on the same type of projects that you are good at and people recognize you for and you will get paid handsomely for it over time because it’s where your expertise lies. But I think again, it is about making a conscious decision that you want to take a risk. That you want to expand your set of tools and the projects you work on. And you have to develop them. And it may take years. … You can’t expect transformation overnight. I think everything happens in gradual steps. The opportunities are there, you just have to identify them. And you have to decide if you want them or not.”

Jiae Kim, Co-Founder of “Theme Magazine”

“Creative people have to believe in the value of their work. If you don’t have any belief then you can’t give anything—designing is an act of giving, and a belief in the value of the work fuels the desire to express something. It’s important to know what your values are and to take care of them.”

Peter Saville, Designer

“What makes the speed bump a good design? It's a simple but highly functional object that's foolproof. It’s not what you would call decorative—but it doesn't need to be. There’s a purity of design to it, based on plain common sense. Often, the simplest and the most effective solutions aren’t dictated by style. In fact, the only real piece of dogma that I was ever taught in school was that form is strictly determined by the function it needs to perform. Accordingly, the generic parking-lot speed bump is a supremely elegant solution to the problem of getting people to slow down. … Still, when we're out driving around, and we come up against a speed bump, it can be a jolting surprise. Which suggests another important point: Design isn’t always a pleasing part of our lives. But as the speed bump teaches us, design is necessary—and it can be extremely practical.”

Chip Kidd, Graphic Designer and Author

“No project is too small for big ideas.”

John Arthur Morefield, Architect

“There was a time when I experienced architecture without thinking about it. Sometimes I can almost feel a particular door handle in my hand, a piece of metal shaped like the back of a spoon. I used to take hold of it when I went into my aunt’s garden. That door handle still seems to me like a special sign of entry into a world of different moods and smells. I remember the sound of the gravel under my feet, the soft gleam of the waxed oak staircase, I can hear the heavy front door closing behind me as I walk along the dark corridor and enter the kitchen, the only really brightly lit room in the house.”

Peter Zumthor, Architect

“Craft is not only recognized in Italy, it is celebrated. It isn't just the craft of a weekend hobbyist; it's a tradition of craft that has built cars, furniture, and fashion, and served as the foundation of an entire economy. As the work day is winding down, scores of Ferrari workers walk the streets of Maranello wearing their work jackets. The sense of pride in that great tradition of excellence in craft and design is palpable throughout this small Italian town. … Beyond macro economics or social politics, the values of craft are the foundation of design excellence. It is not just the ability to make an exquisite object; it's the deep cultural recognition that craft is form of wisdom—the wisdom of the hand.”

Gadi Amit, Founder and Designer of NewDealDesign

“Thinking wrong is really about challenging our conventions, processes and orthodoxies, especially during the idea-generation phase of design. I believe that the process of thinking wrong is an antidote to how our brains create synaptic connections, or heuristic biases, to efficiently function in the world and produce predictable, but expected results. It’s about generating a huge number of possibilities, before selecting or executing, and is based on the assumption that creativity, invention and innovation are good things. At Project M we use a variety of exercises to short circuit our biases and connect things that wouldn’t normally be connected. It doesn’t mean that the final project looks or feels ‘wrong.’”

John Bielenberg, Founder of Project M

“Genius ain’t anything more than elegant common sense.”

Josh Billings, Humorist

“Consciousness of simple order and basic principles is one of the most important matters for the creative worker.”

Armin Hofmann, Graphic Designer and Author

“Shoot? Look at me. Do I have a gun? I’m a photographer.”

Julius Shulman, Photographer

“The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.”

Charles Dickens, Novelist

“Designers decide and design the flow, the copy, the structure of the page, the programmers make all of it come to life by plugging it into the backend. All along both parties trade concessions on how to get the feature done as fast possible by grabbing the easiest value.

So stop thinking about designers as artists who work in a different universe of neat graphics and start thinking of them as someone who decides what goes where, which form elements to use, how to split features between screens, what words to use, and how everything fits together in a coherent experience.”

David Heinemeier Hansson, Programmer

“We owe it to the fields that our houses will not be inferiors of the virgin land they have replaced. We owe it to the worms and the trees that the buildings we cover them with will stand as promises of the highest and most intelligent kind of happiness.”

Alain De Botton, Author

“I don't always shop by words.”

Chris Glass, Creative fella from a small town in southwestern Ohio

“It's like, ‘What can we do that would be weird? Well, we could just play a ton,’ you know? And see what happens, and get the endorphins running, and everything gets crazy. It feels cool, you know?”

Bill Gray, Bassist of The Mae Shi

“My father had a cuisine of generosity, and I try to do the same, but by reducing things. Where we used to use a ladle for our sauces, now we use a spoon.”

Anne-Sophie Pic, Chef

“I don’t like the word still. I am working.”

Eva Zeisal, Industrial Designer and Ceramicist

“Why is normal disappearing, and how do we replace it? I noticed that certain objects in my life performed so well they began to make their presence felt quite strongly. I thought there was something to be learned from them that we were ignoring in our search for sensational new forms.”

Jasper Morrison, Furniture and Product Designer

“It’s like finding a character. When I’m watching somebody act, it’s a behaviour editorial function—I look at someone act, and I might say, ‘I don’t believe him when he says that.’ I don’t know why I don’t believe him, probably because the people that I’ve met, they don’t act like that when they say stuff like that and mean it. I also have rules of thumb about dialogue. For example, I feel that most people, when they speak, are lying. So, I’m looking at the eyes, I’m more interested in the body and seeing how comfortable they are saying what it is they are saying than specifically what they’re saying. I think the same thing is true of cinematography: you’re presented with a room and a scene. You have a feeling about this, maybe it’s Thanksgiving and it’s the end of the day, so there’s no direct sunlight coming in because the sun’s going down behind trees. So you kind of talk about it in those terms.”

David Fincher, Filmmaker

“When I first started to work, in order to proceed, I wrote down a verb list, just to enact certain processes, not to think about sculpture, but to think about how would I involve myself in relation to matter, in a way that would enable me to concentrate on the activity of making something. So I wrote down a simple verb list: To cut, To fold, To curve, To bend, To prop, whatever. And then I started enacting those verbs in relation to given materials, whether it was a piece of rubber, a piece of lead. And Phil Glass, a composer, and myself, would work together and take a given verb for a day, and with certain materials, would go through the processes of trying to form whatever we form.”

Richard Serra, Sculptor

“The most expensive interactive device is a person.”

Jake Barton, Principal of Local Projects