[Sigia-l] SUMMARY: quotations that inspire or inform us as IA's

[Andrew Hinton]

Ok. Long long long ago -- I mean a long freakin time ago -- I solicited this
group for quotations that they found in some way inspiring for their work. I
got a lot of stuff from a lot of sources, and ended up getting it all stored
in so many files on my computer that I couldn't find it all. (Findability,
anyone?)

Now, for various reasons, I'm taking the time to go back and collect it all
together. 

I've posted the summary at <http://www.IAwiki.net/wiki.pl?IACommonplaceBook>
as a beginning of a collaborative "Commonplace Book". I encourage any of you
with a little time to go in there and work on the formatting, etc. It's kind
of rough right now, and I don't have time to make it prettier.

Anyone who wants to add to the list please just go to that page on the
iawiki and contribute.

Below you'll find the raw dump of quotations, as I received them.

Thanks to everyone who participated!!

--

||.. Andrew Hinton
||.. Information Architect
||.. www.memekitchen.com




------------------
Here are quotations gathered from responses I received from members of the
List:

"The two most important tools an architect has are the eraser in the drawing
room and the sledge hammer on the construction site."
-- Frank Lloyd Wright
"Learning is remenbering what you are interested in"
RICHARD SAUL WURMAN, Information Anxiety 2

If you take a middle-of-the-road position, you risk getting hit by
traffic from both directions.
Margaret Thatcher

God is in the details.
Mies van der Rohe

Pray this day, on one side of one sheet of paper, explain how the
Royal Navy is prepared to meet the coming conflict.

--Winston Churchill, Letter to the Admiralty, Sept. 1, 1939

To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist
now.
Samuel Beckett

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Albert Einstein

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
Leonardo DaVinci

Form follows function- that has been misunderstood. Form and function
should be one, joined in a spiritual union
Frank Lloyd Wright
http://www.cmgww.com/historic/flw/quotes.html

The medium is not the message; the message is the message.
Jakob Nielsen (Alertbox, June 15, 1997,
<http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9706b.html>)

"What people say, what people do, and what people say they do are
entirely different things." -- Margaret Meade

"Designers typically spend hours worrying about the type faces used,
the precise color of the background, and whether a button is one
or two pixels to the left, but the fact that the site doesn't work
rarely seems to bother them." -- Jack Schofield

"Know the user. Know that you are not the user." -- (Various)


The classic one from Vitruvius, Roman architecture critic (90-20 BC):
"Well designed buildings exhibit firmness, commodity and delight"


Tognazzini at CHI 98:
"Architects don't design walls, roofs and windows but spaces for humans"


Unknown:
"Design is the art of gradually applying constraints until only one
solution remains"

A good quote from a talk show host now retired from KMOX out of St. Louis,
Jim white,  He was on the air for over 25 years...His quote..."you can't
fix stupid"    meaning there is only so much you can do......


"We cannot reduce complexity; we can only create the illusion of
simplicity." - Grady Booch

"Good design keeps the user happy, the manufacturer in the black and the
aesthete unoffended. " - Raymond Loewy

"Information doesn't want to be free; information wants to be useful."
-Larry Wall

"No matter how beautiful, no matter how cool your interface, it would be
better if there were less of it."
-Alan Cooper

"Never mistake motion for action."
- Ernest Hemingway

"Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to experienced."
- Soren Kierkegaard

"Whoever does not know how to hit the nail on the head should be asked not
to hit it at all"
- Friedrich Nietzsche

Confusion and clutter are failures of design, not attributes of information.
And so the point is to find design strategies that reveal detail and
complexity - rather than to fault the data for an excess of complication.
Or, worse, to fault viewers for a lack of understanding. - Edward Tufte
<http://www.salon.com/march97/tufte970310.html>

The development of more usable and humanly acceptable systems relies on
knowledge and methods that are beyond one existing discipline. - Andrew
Dillon <http://www.asis.org/Conferences/Summit2000/dillon/index.htm>

Information architecture is an intangible area, nearly impossible to measure
in any way. You only notice it if it isn't working. - Lou Rosenfeld
<http://www.jaundicedeye.com/stuck/archive/050897/article.html>

Seveal from Tibor Kalman:
"Rules are good. Break them."
"Good designers (and writers and artists) make trouble."
"Everything is an experiment."

The computer will do for design what the typewriter did for poetry.
-- Milton Glazer 

The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference
between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid.
-- "DeDaumier-Smith's Blue Period," J.D. Salinger

 "Know thy user, and you are not thy user."
- Arnie Lund

The key feature of any site should be restraint. -Flanders & Willis

You ask about the important things to keep in mind: same as ever, with a
task-based twist: what are the users trying to accomplish, what does the
business need them to successfully accomplish, and what will the technology
allow? If you can balance these three forces, you'll have a solid
product. -Christina Wodtke

First: the best is the enemy of the good, trying to be perfect or trying to
meet infinite context will both make you crazy and make you miss your launch
date. The only thing to do is to create a product for your users. Not "The
User" but the specific audience for whom your product is
intended. -Christina Wodtke

In surgery, as in anything else, skill, judgment and confidence are learned
through experience, haltingly and humiliatingly. -Atul Gawande

Do or do not. There is no try. -Yoda

Honesty of materials, solidity of construction, utility,
adaptability to place, esthetic effect. - gustav stickley


Milton Glaser:
"solving the problem is more important than being right"
"style is not to be trusted"
"less is not necessarily more"

"Never offend people with style when you can offend them with substance."
-Sam Brown, Washington Post, 1977

"All steak and no sizzle is just a piece of raw meat"- Anon

First we shape our buildings, then they shape us, then we shape them
again--ad infinitum. Function reforms form, perpetually.
  --Stewart Brand; How Buildings Learn, p. 3

"Shut up and play yer guitar."
--Frank Zappa

"We thrive in information-thick worlds because of our marvelous and everyday
capacities to select, edit, single out, structure, highlight, group, pair,
merge, harmonize, synthesize, focus, organize, condense, reduce, boil down,
choose, categorize, catalog, classify, list, abstract, scan, look into,
idealize, isolate, discriminate, distinguish, screen, pigeonhole, pick over,
sort, integrate, blend, inspect, filter, lump, skip, smooth, chunk, average,
approximate, cluster, aggregate, outline, summarize, itemize, review, dip
into, flip through, browse, glance into, leaf through, skim, refine,
enumerate, glean, synopsize, winnow the wheat from the chaff, and separate
the sheep from the goats.
Envisioning Information
Edward Tufte 

"We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are."
The Talmud


Six from The Tao of the Software Architect

by Lao-Tsu, as revisited by
Philippe Kruchten, Rational Fellow
1.
The architect observes the world
but trusts his inner vision.
He allows things to come and go.
His heart is open as the sky. (12)
----
2.
The architect doesn't talk, she acts.
When this is done,
the team says, "Amazing:
[Scroll 17] we did it, all by ourselves!" (17)
----
3.
When the process is lost, there is good practice.
When good practice is lost, there are rules.
When rules are lost, there is ritual.
Ritual is the beginning of chaos. (38)
----
4.
The architect concerns himself
with the depth and not the surface,
with the fruit and not the flower. (38)
----
5.
The architect allows things to happen.
She shapes events as they come.
She steps out of the way
and lets the design speak for itself. (45)
----
6.
Those who know don't talk.
[Scroll 56] Those who talk don't know. (56)
----

Here are quotations I already had, or that I gathered from various sources
on the 'Net. (Andrew Hinton)


The chief object of education is not to learn things but to unlearn things.
- G.K. Chesterton

Sweet discourse, the banquet of the mind. - John Dryden

Understanding comes from questions, not from answers. - Richard Saul Wurman

A little group of wise hearts is better than a wilderness of fools. - John
Ruskin

If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. - Charlie Parker

When you are reliable and optimised you close the door to innovation. - Cory
Doctorow

The world really is rather puzzling and I cannot help it. - Bertrand Russell

I don't design stuff for myself. I'm a toolmaker. I design things that other
people want to use. - Robert Moog

I can't understande why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened
of the old ones. - John Cage

My cow is not pretty, but it's pretty to me. - David Lynch

When you cut into the present, the future leaks out. - William Burroughs

Every exit is an entry somewhere. - Tom Stoppard

Cyberspace is where your money lives. - William Gibson

The unapparent connection is more powerful than the apparent one. -
Hippolytus

The empires of the future are the empires of the mind. - Sir Winston
Churchill 

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.
- Sir Winston Churchill

Wisdom begins in wonder. - Socrates

"In architecture as in all other operative arts, the end must direct the
operation. The end is to build well. Well building has three conditions:
Commodity, Firmness and Delight."
-Henry Watton 

"If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger."
-Frank Lloyd Wright

"A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his client
to plant vines." 
-Frank Lloyd Wright

"When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how
to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not
beautiful, I know it is wrong."
-Richard Buckminster Fuller

"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we
can find information upon it."
-Samuel Johnson 

"When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby
curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes."
-W. H. Auden 

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause
and reflect." 
-Mark Twain 

"Try to find your deepest issue in every confusion, and abide by that."
-D. H. Lawrence, Selected Essays

Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use
it.
-- George Bernard Shaw
I cannot imagine any condition which would cause this ship to founder.
Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that.
-- E. I. Smith, Captain of the Titanic

Most of the essentials of architecture‹mass, rhythm, texture, outline‹are
within music¹s power. Almost, the two arts are the same art, the one able to
express nearly everything which the imagination is capable of conceiving,
the other bound by the rigours of economy and use.
ATTRIBUTION:    John Newenham Summerson

Walter Gropius
QUOTATION:    Architecture begins where engineering ends.

Architecture ... the adaptation of form to resist force.
ATTRIBUTION:    John Ruskin (1819­1900), British art critic, author.

Philip Johnson
QUOTATION:    All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the
design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in
that space.

Frank Lloyd Wright
QUOTATION:    Architecture is life, or at least it is life itself taking
form and therefore it is the truest record of life as it was lived in the
world yesterday, as it is lived today or ever will be lived.

AUTHOR:    I M Pei
QUOTATION:    It is not an individual act, architecture. You have to
consider your client. Only out of that can you produce great architecture.
You can¹t work in the abstract.

The Grid makes the history of architecture and all previous lessons of
urbanism irrelevant. It forces Manhattan¹s builders to develop a new system
of formal values, to invent strategies for the distinction of one block from
another. The Grid¹s two-dimensional discipline also creates undreamt-of
freedom for three-dimensional anarchy. The Grid defines a new balance
between control and de-control in which the city can be at the same time
ordered and fluid, a metropolis of rigid chaos.
ATTRIBUTION:    Rem Koolhaas

Heredity is a strong factor, even in architecture. Necessity first mothered
invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like
grandma.
ATTRIBUTION:    E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White (1899­1985)

AUTHOR:    Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
QUOTATION:    Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks
together. There it begins.

The job of buildings is to improve human relations: architecture must ease
them, not make them worse.
ATTRIBUTION:    Ralph Erskine (b. 1914), British architect. Times (London,
September 16, 1992).

Information networks straddle the world. Nothing remains concealed. But the
sheer volume of information dissolves the information. We are unable to take
it all in.
ATTRIBUTION:    Günther Grass (b. 1927), German author. Interview in New
Statesman & Society (June 22, 1990).

As information technology restructures the work situation, it abstracts
thought from action.
ATTRIBUTION:    Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951), U.S. social scientist. In the Age
of the Smart Machine, ch. 2 (1988).

Jacqueline Kennedy
QUOTATION:    [I want] minimum information given with maximum politeness.
ATTRIBUTION:    Instructions to press secretary Pamela Turnure, ib

Wisdom is dead. Long live information.
ATTRIBUTION:    Mason Cooley (b. 1927), U.S. aphorist. City Aphorisms, New
York (1984).

When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows
unprofitable, sleep.
ATTRIBUTION:    Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929), U.S. author. The Left Hand of
Darkness, ch. 3 (1969).

The family circle has widened. The worldpool of information fathered by the
electric media‹movies, Telstar, flight‹far surpasses any possible influence
mom and dad can now bring to bear. Character no longer is shaped by only two
earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world¹s a sage.
ATTRIBUTION:    Marshall McLuhan