On Teamwork What I’ve always felt that a team of people doing something they really believe in is like, is like when I was a young kid, there was a widowed man that lived up the street. He was in his 80’s, and a little scary looking, and I got to know him a little bit — I think he paid me to cut his lawn or something — and one day he told me, “come into my garage, I want to show you something.” And he pulled out this dusty old rock tumbler. It was a motor and a coffee can and a band between them. And he said “come out here with me,” so we went out to the back and we got some rocks, just some regular old ugly rocks and we put them in the can with a little bit of liquid and a little bit of grit powder, and he turned the motor on and said “come back tomorrow,” as the tumbler was turning and making a racket. So I came back the next day and what we took out were these amazingly beautiful and polished rocks. The same common stones that had gone in — through rubbing against each other, creating a little bit of friction, creating a little bit of noise — had come out as these beautiful polished rocks. And that’s always been my metaphor for a team working really hard on something they’re passionate about. It’s that through the team, through that group of incredibly talented people bumping up against each other, having arguments, having fights sometimes, making some noise, and working together, they polish each other, and they polish their ideas. And what comes out are these really beautiful stones. Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview teamworkpassionargument
To prove it in purity The series of photos of the 1959 model ends or stops with the photograph in which Kiesler triumphantly shows us the shell of his house like the remains of a creature taken from the seabed, a kind of Moby Dick harpooned and finally captured after the obsessive pursuit of a project that has taken up ten years of the life of the architect. "I think that everybody has only one basic creative idea and no matter how he is driven off, you will find that he always comes back to it until he has a chance to prove it in purity, or die with the idea unrealized." — Frederick Kiesler Smiljan Radić, Some Remains of My Heroes Found Scattered Across a Vacant Lot creativitylifeobsessionpassion
Taste for Makers An Essay by Paul Graham paulgraham.com If there is such a thing as beauty, we need to be able to recognize it. We need good taste to make good things. Instead of treating beauty as an airy abstraction, to be either blathered about or avoided depending on how one feels about airy abstractions, let's try considering it as a practical question: how do you make good stuff? You feel this when you start to design thingsGood design is simpleGood design is timelessGood design is often slightly funnyGood design is hard, but looks easy+3 More Beauty in flight beautytastedesign
You feel this when you start to design things Saying that taste is just personal preference is a good way to prevent disputes. The trouble is, it's not true. You feel this when you start to design things. As in any job, as you continue to design things, you'll get better at it. Your tastes will change. And, like anyone who gets better at their job, you'll know you're getting better. If so, your old tastes were not merely different, but worse. Poof goes the axiom that taste can't be wrong. craft
Good design is simple Good design is simple. You hear this from math to painting. In math it means that a shorter proof tends to be a better one. Where axioms are concerned, especially, less is more. It means much the same thing in programming. For architects and designers it means that beauty should depend on a few carefully chosen structural elements rather than a profusion of superficial ornament. Similarly, in painting, a still life of a few carefully observed and solidly modeled objects will tend to be more interesting than a stretch of flashy but mindlessly repetitive painting of, say, a lace collar. In writing it means: say what you mean and say it briefly. When you're forced to be simple, you're forced to face the real problem. When you can't deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance. simplicity
Good design is timeless Good design is timeless. Aiming at timelessness is a way to make yourself find the best answer: if you can imagine someone surpassing you, you should do it yourself. Some of the greatest masters did this so well that they left little room for those who came after. Every engraver since Durer has had to live in his shadow. Aiming at timelessness is also a way to evade the grip of fashion. Fashions almost by definition change with time, so if you can make something that will still look good far into the future, then its appeal must derive more from merit and less from fashion. timefashion
Good design is often slightly funny Good design is often slightly funny. This one may not always be true. But Durer's engravings and Saarinen's womb chair and the Pantheon and the original Porsche 911 all seem to me slightly funny. Godel's incompleteness theorem seems like a practical joke. I think it's because humor is related to strength. To have a sense of humor is to be strong: to keep one's sense of humor is to shrug off misfortunes, and to lose one's sense of humor is to be wounded by them. humor
Good design is redesign Good design is redesign. It's rare to get things right the first time. Experts expect to throw away some early work. They plan for plans to change. It helps to have a medium that makes change easy. When oil paint replaced tempera in the fifteenth century, it helped painters to deal with difficult subjects like the human figure because, unlike tempera, oil can be blended and overpainted. mistakesplanningagile
Good design can copy Good design can copy. Attitudes to copying often make a round trip. A novice imitates without knowing it; next he tries consciously to be original; finally, he decides it's more important to be right than original. I think the greatest masters go on to achieve a kind of selflessness. They just want to get the right answer, and if part of the right answer has already been discovered by someone else, that's no reason not to use it. They're confident enough to take from anyone without feeling that their own vision will be lost in the process. Four stages of competence skill
I could do better than that As a practical matter, I think it's easier to see ugliness than to imagine beauty. Most of the people who've made beautiful things seem to have done it by fixing something that they thought ugly. Great work usually seems to happen because someone sees something and thinks, I could do better than that. Notes on the Synthesis of Form repair