I try to save quotes related to design that I find intriguing, controversial, or just plain good advice. Here are a few that I keep coming back to.

I'm sure everyone can associate the frustration that occurs when trying to implement new and revolutionary designs inside of large organizations. Shigeru Miyamoto is the Nintendo designer of Donkey Kong, Mario, Legend of Zelda, the Nintendo 64, and now the Nintendo Wii. Even a visionary and revered game designer encounters resistance. Here he discusses the struggles he faced when he decided to throw out 25 years of game controller evolution:

"We had to overcome the hurdle of how to convince users and game designers who had grown accustomed to traditional interfaces. This was an incredibly difficult hurdle. So, to put it in a rather extreme way, I teamed up with ID people to fight against the people creating the current market, or to challenge them - it was kind of like a battle, in a sense. It's not as though we were trying to pick a fight, but whenever you attempt something new, conservatism will always rear its head amongst those who have grown accustomed to the way things are now." [Taking Control Back to the Drawing Board]

Brian Eno is a highly respected record producer and is considered the father of ambient music. He was asked by Microsoft to create the startup sound for Windows 95. Here he speaks about how an outlandish constraint allowed him to break out of a personal design rut:

"The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I'd been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, 'Here's a specific problem -- solve it.' The thing from the agency said, 'We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah-blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,' this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said 'and it must be 3 and 1/4 seconds long.' I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It's like making a tiny little jewel. In fact, I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I'd finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time." [Music Thing]

Lastly, this is a paraphrased quote from the English historian, Sir Michael Howard. I believe he was speaking about managing the aftermath of World War II when he noted that nobody ever gets things right the first time. The question is how you can make sure you are not so wrong that you cannot make up for your mistakes. This quote goes a long way towards understanding the true pressures when creating new and revolutionary designs.

Labels: quotes, ue design