Ralph Caplan > Quotes

“A chair is the first thing you need when you don’t really need anything, and is therefore a peculiarly compelling symbol of civilization. For it is civilization, not survival, that requires design.”
― Ralph Caplan

“Thinking about design is hard, but not thinking about it can be disastrous.”
― Ralph Caplan

“All our media are given over to things that are better left unsaid.”
― Ralph Caplan

“Attention must be paid’ is the cardinal rule of design discipline, for the designer is above all someone who pays attention to the situation at hand.”
― Ralph Caplan

“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.”
― Ralph Caplan

“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...”
― Ralph Caplan, By Design: Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV and Other Object Lessons

“If more designers had bad backs, we would have more good chairs.”
― Ralph Caplan

“Designers shouldn’t design for museums any more than mummies should die for them.”
― Ralph Caplan

“Nothing is more to the point than a good digression.”
― Ralph Caplan

“…no industrial designer worth his salt, or our attention, has been trained to work exclusively on any particular product, unless by accident. What he has been trained to do is practice a process called design, a process that includes esthetic choices but does not consist only of them.”
― Ralph Caplan

“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.”
― Ralph Caplan, By Design: Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV and Other Object Lessons

“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.”
― Ralph Caplan, By Design: Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV and Other Object Lessons

“As I indicated, I do not believe that any chair, however elegant, contributes significantly to life or solves problems that can be considered major by anyone who is not minor.”
― Ralph Caplan, By Design: Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV and Other Object Lessons

“A long time ago Lewis Mumford wrote that "in a society that knows no other ideals, spending becomes the chief source of delight; finally it amounts to a social duty." What an outrageous exaggeration that must have seemed to those at whom it was aimed. Yet today you can hardly pick up a business magazine without finding similar statements never intended to be pejorative. As the photographic historian Judith Mara Gutman says, in a book called Buying,, "the whole process of buying ...determines our daily pace, dictates our nightly rhythm...Buying structures our lives.”
― Ralph Caplan, By Design: Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV and Other Object Lessons

“We should plead not guilty by reason of inanity…”
― Ralph Caplan

“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.”
― Ralph Caplan, By Design: Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV and Other Object Lessons