Daily Inspiration Quote by Alec Issigonis

There is a kind of benevolent arrogance baked into Issigonis's line, the sort that only sounds outrageous if you pretend products emerge from democratic town halls. "The public don't know what they want" is less an insult than a diagnosis: desire is famously inarticulate until it has an object to attach to. People can complain about what exists; they struggle to describe what should.

The kicker is the second clause: "it's my job to tell them". Issigonis frames design as authorship, not service work. The subtext is that good design is a form of leadership - sometimes even coercion - because constraints, taste, and engineering reality require decisions most users can't (and shouldn't have to) make. It's a rebuke to focus-group culture, to the idea that if you just average enough opinions you get truth. You mostly get beige.

Context matters: Issigonis is the mind behind the Mini, a car that arrived as an answer to postwar scarcity and urban crowding, not as a wish list compiled from motorists. The Mini worked because it imposed a vision: transverse engine, compact footprint, maximum interior space. Those are not "wants" in the abstract; they're trade-offs rendered invisible by elegant layout.

There's also a warning embedded in his certainty. When a designer "tells" the public what it wants, the line between vision and paternalism gets thin. Great design earns its authority by being right in retrospect: it makes your life feel obvious only after it's been rearranged.