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.

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

There are no morals about technology at all. Technology expands our ways of thinking about things, expands our ways of doing things. If we're bad people we use technology for bad purposes and if we're good people we use it for good purposes.

The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.

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.

The social sciences, I thought, needed the same kind of rigor and the same mathematical underpinnings that had made the 'hard' sciences so brilliantly successful.

Solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent.