A Quote by Stephen Fry
As if a device can function if it has no style. As if a device can be called stylish that does not function superbly... yes, beauty matters. Boy, does it matter. It is not surface, it is not an extra, it is the thing itself.
Related Quotes
These days, when people are alone, or feel a moment of boredom, they tend to reach for a device. In a movie theater, at a stop sign, at the checkout line at a supermarket and, yes, at a memorial service, reaching for a device becomes so natural that we start to forget that there is a reason, a good reason, to sit still with our thoughts: It does honor to what we are thinking about. It does honor to ourselves.
At the end of the day, a television, a computer, or a smart phone is just a device through which one can access content. The content itself is what matters, not the device.
Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.
Function is fundamental to design, of course. If something doesn't work, it's a bad product, and I certainly get frustrated by things that aren't functional. But there has to be more than function. A house has to function, but if that's all it does, you don't love it.
To me, it really seems visible today that ethics is not something exterior to the economy, which, as technical matter, could function on its own; rather, ethics is an interior principle of the economy itself, which cannot function if it does not take account of the human values of solidarity and reciprocal responsibility.
It win be a device that will permit communication without any time interval between two points in space. The device will not transmit messages, of course; simultaneity is identity. But to our perceptions, that simultaneity will function as a transmission, a sending. So we will be able to use it to talk between worlds, without the long waiting for the message to go and the reply to return that electromagnetic impulses require. It is really a very simple matter. Like a kind of telephone.
I saw lots of music devices. I loved playing with music devices. And like most of the world, I thought of a music device as a music device. Steve Jobs tends to look beyond that, and he doesn't see a music device as having any importance at all - how fast it is, how many songs it can hold, and all that - he sees music itself to a person as a being the important thing.
It would seem that more than function itself, simplicity is the deciding factor in the aesthetic equation. One might call the process beauty through function and simplification.
The iPod Shuffle was something unique for Apple: a device stripped down to a single function.
Good design is also an act of communication between the designer and the user, except that all the communication has to come about by the appearance of the device itself. The device must explain itself.
Telephones in 2020 will be archaic, relics of a bygone era-like transistor radios are today. Telephony, which will be entirely IP-based by then, will be a standard communications chip on many devices. We'll probably carry some kind of screen-based reading device that will perform this function, though I assume when we want to communicate verbally, we'll do so through a tiny, earplug-based device.
Painting doesn't have a function, not in the way that music or film does... I mean, you can dance to music. Music can be used for a soundtrack, so it has a function in that sense, beyond itself. But painting doesn't... But I do believe that painting has a purpose.
Separation of power says the judiciary committee is supposed to confirm qualified judges and then what the Supreme Court does, that is their function, not my function.
When scientists need to explain difficult points of theory, illustration by hypothetical example - rather than by total abstraction - works well (perhaps indispensably) as a rhetorical device. Such cases do not function as speculations in the pejorative sense - as silly stories that provide insight into complex mechanisms - but rather as idealized illustrations to exemplify a difficult point of theory. (Other fields, like philosophy and the law, use such conjectural cases as a standard device.
If form follows function, as we know it does in this Universe, then consciousness will adapt to whatever form it requires in order to function. Hopefully, it will also develop its fundamental function; what that is may be debatable within many schools of thought, but it is indisputable that evolved thinking recognizes the universality of Life.
Students need to decide, 'All right, well, does the height matter? Does the side of it matter? Does the color of the valve matter? What matters here?' - such an underrepresented question in math curriculum.
Related Authors
Bill Maher Quotes
American
Comedian
Craig Ferguson Quotes
Scottish
Comedian
David Letterman Quotes
American
Comedian
Demetri Martin Quotes
American
Comedian
Ellen DeGeneres Quotes
American
Comedian
George Carlin Quotes
American
Comedian
Jay Leno Quotes
American
Comedian
Jim Gaffigan Quotes
American
Comedian
Jimmy Fallon Quotes
American
Comedian
Joan Rivers Quotes
American
Comedian
Mitch Hedberg Quotes
American
Comedian
P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
American
Comedian
Robin Williams Quotes
American
Comedian
Rodney Dangerfield Quotes
American
Comedian
Stephen Colbert Quotes
American
Comedian
Steven Wright Quotes
American
Comedian