Nature & Animals Quote by Alec Issigonis

The joke lands because it’s cruelly accurate about how good intentions curdle into compromised design. Issigonis, the designer behind the Mini, isn’t just taking a cheap shot at ugly outcomes; he’s diagnosing a process disease. A horse is elegance with a purpose: coherent, legible, built for motion. A camel is what happens when you keep bolting on requirements until the original idea becomes unrecognizable yet somehow survivable. The punchline isn’t that camels are bad. It’s that they’re optimized for a different environment than anyone first imagined.

Issigonis worked in a mid-century Britain where industrial design sat at the intersection of engineering limits, production realities, and managerial oversight. In that world, “committee” doesn’t mean collaboration at its best; it means decision-making diffused until no one is accountable for the final form. Every stakeholder gets a say, so the product accumulates features like scar tissue: a higher roofline for comfort, an extra bracket for safety, a tweak for cost, a concession for tooling. Each change is rational in isolation, and disastrous in aggregate.

The subtext is a defense of authorial clarity. Issigonis is arguing that great design needs a spine: a single, governing idea strong enough to say no. Committees excel at minimizing risk and maximizing consensus, which is exactly how you end up with something that offends no one and delights no one. The line still survives because it’s basically a law of modern life: from apps to public policy, “more voices” can mean “less vision,” and the result is a camel - sturdy, functional, and miles away from the horse you promised.