Charles Eames

"My wife is a painter, and a very good one... and we’ve been working together for, oh, twelve years now, I guess...and at first I used to help and criticize things she was doing, and then she would help and criticize things I was doing, and we would... pitch in and do all the jiggering for each other and get it as people do... and then, gradually, things begin to sort of, you know, entropy... things began to get shuffled, and pretty soon you didn’t know, sort of, where one started and the other ended, and anything that we’ve looked at or talked about here, you know, I say that I’m doing it, but actually, she’s doing it just as much as I am, only she sort of goes under the same corporate type name..."

"I have never been forced to accept compromises but I have willingly accepted constraints."

"Eventually everything connects - people, ideas, objects... the quality of the connections is the key to quality per se."

"The details are not the details. These make the design."

"One could describe Design as a plan for arranging elements to accomplish a particular purpose."

"[Design is] an expression of purpose. It may, if it is good enough, later be judged as art."

"Design may be a solution to some industrial problems."

"Q: Does the creation of Design admit constraint? Design depends largely on constraints. Q: What constraints? The sum of all constraints. Here is one of the few effective keys to the Design problem: the ability of the Designer to recognize as many of the constraints as possible; his willingness and enthusiasm for working within these constraints. Constraints of price, of size, of strength, of balance, of surface, of time, and so forth. Each problem has its own peculiar list."

"Choose your corner, pick away at it carefully, intensely and to the best of your ability and that way you might change the world."

"Designers should only innovate as a last resort."