design principles

an interesting place I saw on-line had some interesting thoughts in their design principles...very apt..thought i would quote a few here..

"Eat What You Kill"

It's perfectly acceptable to supersede some time-honored
tool or practice. However, you should take pains to fully
comprehend the thing you have rendered obsolescent. You
are removing some part, however modest, of the
infrastructure of civilization. You are destroying the
work of previous designers; you should offer them the
respect you yourself would hope for, under similar
circumstances. This is for your own good. You can't
comprehend your own accomplishment until you have fully
internalized and understood the accomplishment that you
are undoing.

or this one I thought was pretty good too...

"Avoid the Timeless, Embrace Decay"

Platonic visions of absolute reality, and Christian
visions of eternity, are very unhealthy for bipedal
mammals in a biosphere. Nothing physical is eternal.
It's very bad design to create some device which quickly
ceases to function, while its useless components persist
around us, ugly and dangerous. Entropy deserves our
respect and attention. Entropic processes such as
corrosion, rot, rust, degradation, delamination, and
disintegration should be closely studied, harnessed for
industrial use, and even aestheticized.

or this one...

"The Future is History -- Be When You Are"

The future is not a stage set. The past is not a sacred
myth. The past and the future are this place at a
different time. The future is advancing upon you, and the
past retreating, at a remorseless rate of one second per
second. You can seek understanding anywhere, but you can
only act in the moment. "You Own Modernity." It's easy to
get transfixed by romantic ideas of historical
inevitability: glamorous marches of progress, or gruesome
congenital declines. But your own epoch is your own
problem. If you call yourself "post" or "former," or
"neo" or "retro," you are begging for someone else's
troubles.

this one is for jimmy c...

"Design For Evil"

Any innocent product which becomes suddenly genocidal in
the hands of a tyrant has been designed by a dangerous
naif. Every design process is incomplete unless it takes
into careful consideration what could be done with the
product by a dictatorial megalomaniac in command of a
national economy, a secret police, and a large army.

and this one was jut plain thought inspiring...

"Seek the Biomorphic and the Transorganic"

"Nature" is over. There's not a liter of seawater
anywhere without its share of PCB and DDT, and an altered
climate will reshuffle the ecological deck for every
creature that breathes. A 21st century avant-garde must
deal with those consequences and thrive in that world.
We have already painted flowers. We want to know what a
flower means when a flower has onboard processing, amped-
up genetics, and its own agenda. Thus a central Viridian
aesthetic dictum: "A Rose is No Longer a Rose."