This is the first issue of Dwell to feature a guest editor, and we are thrilled to welcome tech entrepreneur Dave Morin to our pages. To get a sense of his perspective on smart homes, scroll over to his essay. In the meantime, we thought we’d share a collection of quotes that kept us inspired as we worked together to select the stories that follow.

Amanda Dameron, Editor-in-Chief

“We are born with an operational system that is integrated. Everything is working together. Nature’s design has the senses coordinated in order to provide protection and efficiency in the environments that we originally inhabited. Humans are very adaptive, more adaptive than many other creatures. We are all over the planet and generation by generation making further adaptions.” —Charlie Morrow

“We see ahead when we make designs that are materialized in the future, when we write problems that anticipate solutions, when we link one step to another in navigating our lives...” —John Maeda

“The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.” —Mark Weiser

“Everything changes so quickly, and what is state of the art one moment won’t be the next. Adaptation has to be ongoing—we have to know and accept this. These are transient times.” —Charlotte Perriand

“Wherever technology reaches its real fulfillment, it transcends into architecture.” —Mies van der Rohe

“...the human being [can] bring about devices which will then decrease the restraints on man, which will give him more of his fundamental capacity of his own time to be invested by him in his own free will way, freeing him from just a service to his own processes, then addressing this extraordinary advantage given to humanity, the privilege of being an inventor and seeing what we ought to invent in relation to our now-known problems...” —R. Buckminster Fuller

“Design should not be simply an embellishment of our lives, something we enjoy on special occasions. It should be an integral part of everything we do. It should be both physical and spiritual enrichment.” —John Vassos

“Technology…is not only offering new functionalities and new modes of expressions; it becomes a cultural medium deeply affecting the perception of the world: how it is conceptualized and experienced.”
—Aurélie Mossé

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A Meadow With Amenities