A gradual refinement The steel rail is an artifact whose form has been carefully optimized. This gradual refinement of the design was done not by a single brilliant engineer but by more than a century of industrial evolution. The rail was never meant to be an object of beauty, but its cross section has all the elegance of fine typography. Brian Hayes, Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape elegancetypographytransportationevolutionchange
Large combinatorial spaces For the theory of design is that general theory of search through large combinatorial spaces. Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial The rational model of design