A few key ideas on design to introduce some of its fundamental characteristics...

1. Design ethos: key
aphorisms

2. When I am working on a problem, I never
think about beauty but when I have
finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I
know it is wrong.
R. Buckminster Fuller

3. A great building must begin with the
unmeasurable, must go through
measurable means when it is being
designed and in the end must be
unmeasurable
Louis Kahn

4. Our guiding principle was that design is
neither an intellectual nor a material
affair, but simply an integral part of the
stuff of life, necessary for everyone in a
civilized society.
Walter Gropius

5. Design is a funny word. Some
people think design means how it
looks. But of course, if you dig
deeper, it's really how it works.
Steve Jobs

6. What is design? It's where you stand with
a foot in two worlds - the world of
technology and the world of people and
human purposes - and you try to bring
the two together.
Mitchell Kapor

7. A designer knows he has
achieved perfection not when
there is nothing left to add, but
when there is nothing left to take
away.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

8. Discontent is the first
necessity of progress.
Thomas A. Edison

9. Recognizing the need is the
primary condition for design.
Charles Eames

10. Opportunity is missed by most
people because it is dressed
in overalls and looks like work.
Thomas A. Edison

11. Form follows function - that has
been misunderstood. Form and
function should be one, joined in
a spiritual union.
Frank Lloyd Wright

12. To invent, you need a good
imagination and a pile of junk.
Thomas A. Edison

13. Regard it as just as desirable
to build a chicken house as to
build a cathedral.
Frank Lloyd Wright

14. In my opinion, no single
design is apt to be optimal for
everyone.
Donald Norman

15. A designer is an emerging synthesis of
artist, inventor, mechanic, objective
economist and evolutionary strategist.
R. Buckminster Fuller

16. Engineering, medicine, business,
architecture and painting are concerned
not with the necessary but with the
contingent - not with how things are but
with how they might be - in short, with
design.
Herbert Simon

17. Humanity is acquiring all the right
technology for all the wrong reasons.
R. Buckminster Fuller

18. Everyone is born a genius, but
the process of living de-
geniuses them.
R. Buckminster Fuller

19. The earth is like a spaceship
that didn't come with an
operating manual.
R. Buckminster Fuller

20. I'm drawn to furniture
design as complete
architecture on a minor
scale.
Brad Pitt
Ever since I was young I
loved making things and
being part of the design
process.
Maria Sharapova
http://blogs.coventrytelegraph.net/passtheremote/brad%20pitt%20jan%202013.jpg http://cdn.caradvice.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/maria-sharapova-porsche-14.jpeg