Fulfilling my quota of quotations.

• "Good design is a dualist state; it exists only because it is better than bad design. Without bad design, there would be no design at all, just objects."
  
  -Jonathan Bell on Industrial Facility for Icon magazine
  
  
• "How do you feel about the term "design art"?
  Mer: I prefer the term experimental design, rather than design art. So many things people label as design art are not truly about art; they're about the user, about the process of making, and they speak about design language in a way that art simply doesn't attempt to. Someone can buy an expensive product, but it's still design. I'm driven by design, not artistic values. Eventually my products can be artistic, but it's a very different starting point.
  Alkalay: Maybe our work isn't 100 percent functional and has an element of fantasy to it, but we don't think of it as pieces of art. At the most, we are experimenting with design."
  
  - from "On the Edge", an interview with Shay Alkalay and partner Yael Mer of Raw-Edges Design in Wallpaper Magazine
  
  
• Another reason I love these guys: Intelligentsia has phased out their "venti" sized coffee. "Drinking our coffee is not like drinking jug wine," said Intelligentsia Coffee founder and Chief Executive Doug Zell on Tuesday. "We're focused on intensity of flavors and providing coffee in the way it tastes best. And it's not in that size." And as a final f-you to Starbucks, he calls 20 oz. espresso drinks "watered-down, Big Gulpish version[s]". I love seeing small business owners with ideals and the conviction to stand up to meaningless industry standards.
  
  
• "Under the guise of “irony,” hipsterism fetishizes the authentic and regurgitates it with a winking inauthenticity."
  
  - From 'Why the Hipster Must Die' in Time Out New York, the first article I've read that actually analyzes hipsterism in an astute and interesting manner that doesn't completely rely on flat stereotypes and tired cliches.

  7/14/2008