Marcel Wanders

“Being open to the unexpected allows me to bring so much to my craft.”

“I collect memories. I look for opportunities to try new things, go to new places, and meet new people all the time.”

“If you acquire things, you have to let them go.”

“That word 'fantasy' - I hardly ever hear it in the world of design. And that's very strange. You should hear it a lot. I think fantasy is a very important value that designers and artists should bring to the world.”

“When you look at the work you do every day, you do see things. But if you look at the work you did for 25 years, suddenly you start to get a more complete picture.”

“Everything has been thought of before... the real problem is to think of it again.”

“The need to express yourself in Los Angeles makes the city so vibrant. If I lived here, it would be lovely to be in a cool new high-rise looking out over a city that is exploding.”

“Food can be a material, and you can use it as a way to project concepts.”

“San Francisco is a lot like Amsterdam - free, open-minded and casual - though I expected better weather.”

“I want to make sure people are connected with the future as well as the past.”

“In tech, people want an object for what's inside it, what it does. You need to make a defensive design that people won't walk away from. A chair is aggressive - you want a customer to choose it from many others.”

“When I wrote my book about Amsterdam, the main objective was to talk about the city's creativity rather than just its design.”

“What's special about Amsterdam is that the city is able to connect worlds that are not otherwise connected.”

“Beauty is only about relationships. Nothing is beautiful on its own.”

“An object should elicit desire, and often it happens not because people need it but because they love it.”

“Nobody's interested in something that could've been done before.”

“I don't just want to create products. I want to reach into people's hearts and minds. I want to create memories.”

“Every project has its own logic and parameters. In some objects, functionality is primary, and in others, it is rather inconsequential.”

“Modernism is an outmoded way of thinking about design: it just doesn't reflect the way we live now. It always puts forward this idea that the past is irrelevant to tomorrow - and tomorrow is all that matters. But the past is part of who we are.”

“Great design is so many things all at the same time. It is emotional, functional, and responsive. It creates an unwritten dialogue, a connection, between itself and those who experience it. It is open to interpretation yet created for a specific purpose. It creates meaning and value.”