When you say 'design,' everybody thinks of magazine pages. So it's an emotive word. Everybody thinks it's how something looks, whereas for me, design is pretty much everything.

I don't particularly follow the Bauhaus school of design, where you make everything into a black box - simplify it.

Design and technology should be the subject where mathematical brainboxes and science whizzkids turn their bright ideas into useful products.

Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose.

The details are not the details. They make the design.

I think fashion is a lot of fun. I love clothes. More than fashion or brand labels, I love design. I love the thought that people put into clothes. I love when clothes make cultural statements and I think personal style is really cool. I also freely recognize that fashion should be a hobby.

I'd like to design something like a city or a museum. I want to do something hands on rather than just play golf which is the sport of the religious right.

I'm drawn to furniture design as complete architecture on a minor scale.

McSweeney's as a publishing company is built on a business model that only works when we sell physical books. So we try to put a lot of effort into the design and production of the book-as-object.

When I announced the development of Perl 6, I said it was going to be a community design. I designed Perl, myself. It's limited by my own brain power. So I wanted Perl 6 to be a community design.