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Ralph Caplan

Ralph Caplan Biography

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“The prospect of physical discomfort has not deterred anyone from buying, or sitting in, chairs that hurt. A painful chair, however, is more willingly bought and endured if it carries the imprimatur of a museum or some other respectable design authenticator. Randall Jarrell noted, with great wit but no exaggeration, that there are people who "...will sit on a porcupine if you first exhibit it at the Museum of Modern Art and say that it is a chair. In fact, there is nothing, nothing in the whole world that someone won't buy and sit in if you tell him that it is a chair...”

DesignComfortChairsMuseumsDiscomfort
Book:By Design: Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV and Other Object Lessons
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“Museums, whatever their content, are logical design arenas. Their renewed vitality reflects a spreading curatorial perception that a museum is a designed situation more than it is a warehouse open to the public. This in turn has made it possible for a great many people, including children, to perceive museum-going as something to do, rather than something that is done to you.”

DesignMuseumsExhibitsExperiences
Book:By Design: Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV and Other Object Lessons
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“The experience of riding in a subway or elevator calls to mind Bertrand Russell's remark that much of modern anxiety stems from the time we spend in unnatural proximity to strangers without the preliminary sniffing that is instinctive in animals, including us.”

DesignAnxietyTransportationElevatorsPublic TransportationSubways
Book:By Design: Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV and Other Object Lessons
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“For the very nature of the product designer's role in industry tends to militate against his effectiveness. He is schooled--and presumably motivated--to design things for people; but he is retained to design things for the market.”

DesignIndustryMarketDesigners
Book:By Design: Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV and Other Object Lessons
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“...one of hallmarks of a creative person is the ability to tolerate ambiguity, dissonance, inconsistency, things out of place. But one of the rules of a well-run corporation is that surprise is to be minimized. Yet if this rule were applied to the creative process, nothing worth reading would get written, nothing worth seeing would get painted, nothing worth living with and using would ever get designed.”

IfsWellsPersonsRunningReadingProcessAbilityCreativeWrittenSeeingSurpriseCorporationsCreative ProcessTolerateAmbiguityWorth LivingHallmarkCreative PersonInconsistencyDissonanceWorth Reading
Author:Ralph Caplan
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“We are … the un-proud non-possessors of objects whose chief substance is that of the transient symbol. Our Puritan fear of the love of things turns out to have been groundless after all, for we do not love things or even possess them: they pass through our lives as barium passes through the digestive tract, unassimilated, their function merely to flash signals along the way.”

WayHas BeensTurnsOur LivesObjectsProudFunctionSymbolsChiefsSubstanceFlashSignalsTransientPuritan
Author:Ralph Caplan
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“It is important to notice that these badly functioning designs were praised for 'elegance.' But elegance as theoretical scientists apply it is quite different. The elegance of a mathematical formula is that it explains a phenomenon beautifully, with no parts left over. In design, elegance is more readily perceived as a property of product than of process. If we had more elegant theories, we might look to design for more than elegance.”

IfsLooksImportantDifferentMightLeftProcessDesignProductsTheoryScientistPropertyMathematicalPhenomenonFormulasElegantEleganceTheoreticalGraphicGraphic Design
Book:Cracking the Whip: Essays on Design and Its Side Effects
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