Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Paola Antonelli

Italian Senior Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art, New York City

"As we become more and more wireless and impalpable, designers, instead, want us to be hands-on."

"Designers need to be mavericks, because the best way to design a successful object is to pretend that either it never existed or that people will be able to have a new behavior with it."

"People think that design is styling. Design is not style. It?s not about giving shape to the shell and not giving a damn about the guts. Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, and beauty to produce something that the world didn?t know it was missing."

"Small objects, like the Walkman first and then the iPod, create bubbles of space around us that enable us to have a metaphysical space that is much bigger than our physical space."

"Beauty and usefulness alone were not enough to justify inclusion in this exhibition."

"Each object had to transcend the outcome of the equation of its form and function by displaying meaning -- to an individual, to a community, to the world at large -- and last but not least, ingenious beauty."

"Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, and beauty to produce something that the world didn?t know it was missing."

"Designers stand between revolutions and everyday life. They?re able to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and society and convert those changes into objects and ideas that people can understand."

"Heaven is satisfied curiosity."

"In an ideal world, social responsibility would be a prerequisite for design, and designers would vow to produce beautiful, useful, positive, responsible, functional, and economical things and concepts that are meaningful additions to?or sometimes subtractions from?the world we live in. Indeed, design deserves such thoughtful consideration."

"Life is tough; thank God there's design."

"They're ironic statements on the absurdity of our fears."