Herbert Simon Design Quotations

The proper study of mankind is the science of design.

Engineering, medicine, business, architecture and painting are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent - not with how things are but with how they might be - in short, with design.

Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.

Solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent.

Engineers are not the only professional designers. Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. The intellectual activity that produces material artefacts is no different fundamentally from the one that prescribes remedies for a sick patient or the one that devises a new sales plan for a company or a social welfare policy for a state.

Think of the design process as involving first the generation of alternatives and then the testing of these alternatives against a whole array of requirements and restraints.