A Quote by Thomas Heatherwick

When I was little, I just was very tuned in to the functionality and aesthetics of things around me. — © Thomas Heatherwick
When I was little, I just was very tuned in to the functionality and aesthetics of things around me.
I don't think people experiment enough with clothing because society tries to tell them what they can and can't wear. I love playing around with different aesthetics and/or mixing around aesthetics to create a totally new look.
Design must be functional, and functionality must be translated into visual aesthetics without any reliance on gimmicks that have to be explained.
Design must be functional and functionality must be translated into visual aesthetics, without any reliance on gimmicks that have to be explained.
A violin is tuned to a fifth. But a guitar is tuned to a fourth with a one-third middle. It is very perplexing to composers.
And yes, there are things I want to keep, that I like around me - especially when there's very little left. I just want to keep those little bits of reminders of my past. There are certain drawings from the '60s; certain little paintings from the '60s that I keep.
I'm still a tomboy. I mean, I obviously dress it up slightly more, but when I'm just me, I'm still very casual. I love comfort. Comfort is very key to me because I spend most of my time in very uncomfortable things, so it's all about trainers and flats. On a shoot, if they're like, "Play around a bit," I'm going to be climbing on top of things and jumping off, and people are going to be trying to stop me, like, "You mucked this up," and, "You're going to hurt yourself," while I'm flying around in heels, just being crazy.
My mother played a little bit of the old time clawhammer. She tuned the banjo up and picked one tune for me, and it just become natural to me. When she picked it, I just started and picked it, too.
I look for things that are very different from my life, and that are curious and idiosyncratic to me. And then, I like to find if I'm able, just a little bit, to step into a world that I know very little about. That's great fun.
It's all discipline and schedule for me. I mean, it's very easy to get distracted by the real world and things that intrude constantly, and it takes dedication to live totally in your head and be tuned out.
I'm becoming far more interested in just functionality and making sure my body is as strong as it can be so I can swing my kids around and not worry about aches and pains.
I think I have a finely tuned sense of humor. I think just being around it and growing up in it... my dad and Mel Brooks and Norman Lear. These are the people I grew up around.
You just have to take a little salt, and since I'm doing that it's, like, BOOM! In one week, I felt it kick in. All the commotion around me, all the water around me, moving left and right around me, became like a lake.
I think the first time you have to change code you’ve written previously, to add features or remove a bug, you realize that you could have done it better in the first place, that you could have found an architecture that would make it easier to transform and grow the code. And this is terribly seductive—you’re not just building a solution to a problem, you’re potentially building a beautiful solution, with ‘beautiful’ here being defined here by an aesthetics of present and future functionality. This can be a trap.
As a designer, everything is always about aesthetics mixed in with functionality and having that visual appeal. But you learn fast as a new parent with an infant that if it’s not deeply practical as well, then forget about it. Style wise, I wanted to design items that would work well in any nursery - regardless of gender.
We’re surrounded by anonymous, poorly made objects. It’s tempting to think it’s because the people who use them don’t care - just like the people who make them. But what we’ve shown is that people do care. It’s not just about aesthetics. They care about things that are thoughtfully conceived and well made. We make and sell a very, very large number of (hopefully) beautiful, well-made things. our success is a victory for purity, integrity - for giving a damn.
Technically I can get out of my wheelchair and crawl around and do things, but when I've traveled and they've lost my wheelchair in transit, I feel like I need to be bound to it. My functionality and autonomy are often bound to this.
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