Many a corner office I want you to consider instead the possibility that Waterfall came to exist, and continues to exist, for the convenience of managers: people whose methods are inherited from military and civil engineering, and who, more than anything else, need you to promise them something specific, and then deliver exactly what you promised them, when you promised you’d deliver it. There exists many a corner office whose occupant, if forced to choose, will take an absence of surprises over a substantive outcome. Dorian Taylor, Agile as Trauma surpriseplanning
In ways you didn't anticipate A Quote by Patrick Hebron www.noemamag.com I always have a hard time wrapping my mind around some of the classic user questions: What is this thing for, is it for novices or professionals, etc? I do my best to avoid these questions, because the best thing you can possibly accomplish as the maker of a tool is to build something that gets used in ways you didn’t anticipate. If you’re building a tool that gets used in exactly the ways that you wrote out on paper, you shot very low. You did something literal and obvious. All sorts of ways to use the machineHacking is the opposite of marketingStretching the productThis tactile form of doodling toolssurpriseux
The arbitrariness of the sign A key difference between verbal language and the modernist ideal of a visual “language” is the arbitrariness of a verbal sign, which has no natural, inherent relationship to the concept it represents. The sound of the word “horse”, for example, does not innately resemble the concept of a horse. Ferdinand de Saussure called this arbitrariness the fundamental feature of the verbal sign. The meaning of a sign is generated by its relationship to other signs in the language: the sign’s legibility lies in its difference from other signs. Ellen Lupton & J. Abbott Miller, The ABC's of ▲■●: The Bauhaus and Design Theory Gods of the Word soundmeaninglanguage