Philippe Starck Quotes

Everything I have designed is absolutely unnecessary.

Subversive, ethical, ecological, political, humorous ... this is how I see my duty as a designer.

Design does not really interest me

Elegance and honesty are two mandatory parameters for any human production.

Anyone can build a building that protects people from heat, sun and cold. What I am determined to do is to make a stage where people can be sexier and more brilliant, a place where they can awake smarter.

The more materiality there is, the less humanity there is

We have to replace beauty, which is a cultural concept, with goodness, which is a humanist concept.

For the organic food, the less it's designed, the better it is

Everywhere, I'm looking to reach elegance and intelligence.

Working with Emeco has allowed me to use a recycled material and transform it into something that never needs to be discarded - a tireless and unbreakable chair to use and enjoy for a lifetime. It is a chair you never own, you just use it for a while until it is the next persons turn. A great chair never should have to be recycled. This is good consideration of nature and man kind.

For me, luxury is intelligence and quality. I don't see a lot of intelligence and quality in luxury when it's used to make fast, big money.

You create your own decoration. You choose your color, you choose your mood. ... If you are depressed, you put some bright yellow and suddenly you are happy.

No one is obliged to be a genius, but everyone is obliged to participate.

Design is a dreadful form of expression

Design is a tool to help the tribe.

I like to open the doors to people's brain.

Providing a real way to deal with the urgent needs of environmental issues that is accessible to everyone is the new fight for the democratization of design.

My idea is to bring happiness, respect, vision, poetry, surrealism and magic [to design].

Getting to the heart of things, is never easy

I have this mental sickness called creativity.

My juicer is not meant to squeeze lemons; it is meant to start conversations.

Everything I do is a symbol. Everything, has a meaning.

The best everyday example of relativity, the finest symptom of human intelligence, is humor. (...) Design without humor is not human. The word 'beautiful' does not mean anything. Only coherence counts. An object, design or not, is primarily an object that meets the parameters of human intelligence, which reconciles opposites. The lack of humor is the definition of vulgarity.

Despite its simple and humble design, Zik is certainly today one of our most successful products in terms of intuitive ergonomics.

Freedom is the only style. That is why I never speak about beauty or beautiful products but "good products"... Nowadays, we have to face so many challenges,...so it is not really a priority to care for beauty. The only way for us is to focus on an ethic and ecological behaviour.

I try to rediscover why that object exists at all, and why one should take the trouble to reconsider It. I don't consider the technical or commercial parameters so much as the desire for a dream that humans have attempted to project onto an object.

I wanted the bike to be able to go over all kinds of terrains and especially infinite and poetic territories.

I'm not a god, I'm not a genius, I'm not a monk, I make non-design for non-consumers. I don't know if I do exist.

In future there will be no more designers. The designers of the future will be the personal coach, the gym trainer, the diet consultant.

In our civilization, there are permanent forms which are part of every epoch and every culture. They are not especially difficult to detect. A minimal knowledge of physics, astrophysics, and perhaps mathematics, brings to light certain patterns that make these subjects easier to understand. It is striking to see the extreme similarity between these scientific propositions and the forms that recur in all times, places and civilizations.

Dreaming is a form of action. Idleness is a form of action. The idle man stares at the sky and sees what constitutes our eternal ceiling. The sky is one of the things that constructs us, one of our constants. But it is not what people believe. I should like to close this circle by turning over in my bed and scrutinizing the stars.

In perhaps 50 years, 60 years, we can finish completely this civilization, and offer to our children the possibility to invent a new story, a new poetry, a new romanticism.

Future is about dematerialisation.