There is so much blandness and grayness out there, people want to be able to say “it’s mine.” They want to customize their cars like they customize a jeans jacket.

Uncertainty is intrinsic to the process of finding out what you don’t know, not a weakness to avoid.

Give ordinary people the right tools, and they will design and build the most extraordinary things.

There is so much blandness and grayness out there, people want to be able to say "it's mine." They want to customize their cars like they customize a jeans jacket.

Uncertainty is intrinsic to the process of finding out what you don't know, not a weakness to avoid.

For a smart material to be able to send out a more complex signal it needs to be nonlinear. If you hit a tuning fork twice as hard it will ring twice as loud but still at the same frequency. That's a linear response. If you hit a person twice as hard they're unlikely just to shout twice as loud. That property lets you learn more about the person than the tuning fork.

Chaos has come to be associated with the study of anything complex, but, in fact, the mathematical techniques are directly applicable only to simple systems that appear to be complex.

By not lobbing a few extra cannon shells, he could afford to make these community investments.

By personal fabrication, what I mean is ordinary people creating, rather than consuming technology, creating technology to solve local problems.

In a few seconds, you can transform a two-dimensional sheet of acrylic into a three-dimensional object.