13 Quotes by Tania Allen

For designers to understand their work as part of a dialogue influences the design output in much more nuanced ways, and relieves the designer from the burden of needing to control every aspect of the experience.

A similar argument can be made about the form that the interface takes—with little pictures of folders and pages and trash cans. Those analogies are based in physical forms and so we associate the simplicity of the physical folder with that of the digital one. At best, we have faith in the interface that it is an accurate simplification of a more complex system behind it, and at worse, we don’t even recognize the complexity at all.

...for design to truly address issues of sustainability necessitates a change in how we define innovation, and move beyond what we can do to what we should do.

One simple thing that we might do in the research process is a simple renaming of the user as a reader or interpreter, which emphasizes the interpretive nature of design interactions.

Designers are future-makers. But designers also need to continually acknowledge their role as one piece in a very large puzzle that makes the world a different place tomorrow than it was today. While the idealism and utopianism that often characterize design solutions are valuable in the sense that they allow us all to see what might be in a perfect work, it might be more beneficial to start to consider design as moving from “the solution” to “a solution".

Google Maps is devised as a crutch to help us navigate the world in an easier way, but by extension the same technology prevents us from understanding the world in a holistic way, or thinking critically about the route that we should take, or even from the route that might be most enjoyable.

Once designers start to look for patterns, they start noticing them everywhere. So, the goal of teaching students how to engage is design research is as much about verifying the validity of those patterns as it is about identifying them in the first place.

Designers need to understand various perspectives that exist in the world—and to be able to speak many different “languages” in order to translate these ideas in meaningful ways.

Much as participatory design and placemaking was a reaction to the lack of citizen involvement in the planning process, the history of incremental city design was a reaction to the utopian master plan that dictated whole scale redevelopment in favor of an incremental approach that gradually affected the status quo. As a theory of policymaking, incrementalism was first introduced by Charles Lindblom in the 1950s.