You can live your life as the result of history and what came before, or you can live your life as the cause of what’s to come. You choose.

When I turned 35, I shifted my desire to be happy to a desire to be useful. It made all the difference.

The goal is to make the complicated simple — not the other way around. The best ideas are often expressed as simple ideas. They’ll have power because they’ll feel inevitable.

Ubiquity = Invisibility. What we’re overly familiar with, what becomes common, we stop seeing. One function of design is to restore our perception, renew our understanding, and invite us to be more alert.

We perceive through images. We think in metaphors. We learn by stories. We create with fantasy.

The era of problem-solving is gone. It’s too reactive in a world where the future arrives too fast. Designers must now be problem seekers, finding and anticipating problems before they arrive on our desks, because at that point, it’s already too late.

Design is not what we make. Design is what we make possible.

A good designer will help a company get to where they want to go. A great designer will push a company to where they should go.

Put this over your desk: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Buckminster Fuller knew stuff.