Anything that gives us new knowledge gives us an opportunity to be more rational.

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.

The engineer, and more generally the designer, is concerned with how things ought to be - how they ought to be in order to attain goals, and to function.

Learning results from what the student does and thinks, and only from what the student does and thinks. The teacher can advance learning only by influencing the student to learn.

One finds limits by pushing them.

A complex decision is like a great river, drawing from its many tributaries the innumerable premises of which it is constituted.

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.