Marcel Wanders

For me, true kitsch has nothing to do with irony. It's very honest. It represents what people like, their dreams.

I am quite familiar with Dubai and its design scene. I have been a regular visitor for more than 10 years. It is hard to name an area where hospitality, friendship, culture, ambition, and beauty are so highly regarded.

The things I own are sacred.

There is always a reason behind things that are made, and if there isn't, there will be one when they travel through the world. The objects of beauty are used to impress, seduce, overwhelm, make money, support identities, and show power or style, among other things.

I'm not the type of person who feels bad about things before. I choose what to do at the moment, and I have a very good reason for it; otherwise, I don't do it. If later my feelings change, I should celebrate now by being more wise, not feel bad about before.

Beauty is very important, but it's not the most important thing in the world.

I think what makes me different is that... I am comfortable with expressing my vulnerability. I think designers often want to just put the loveable ideas out there. Ones that are imaginative but not very introspective. It is more rare for a designer to explore his or her disappointments and moments of disillusion and doubt.

By training, I'm an engineer, but I don't tell anyone because it bores people.

As humans, we are not so rationalist as we think we are. I think our biggest quality is indeed that we are human, truly human: if our biggest quality would be rationality, we would lose our soul.

I want to create a world with objects and surroundings that are human, more romantic, and less sterile.

We are buying stuff we know we don't need, and that is a problem we should face in design. It starts with creating an object that transports through time a valuable idea: that it can live forever.

The one thing we should address is how design can play a role in the psychological durability of objects, to think of how objects can be engineered in a way that they will be good over time.