Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller was an American engineer, designer, futurist, author of more than 30 books, and a very good friend of Marshall McLuhan, but perhaps most well known for the architectural design of the geodesic dome and popularizing the phrase “spaceship earth”.
While exploring the website of the designer (apparently) chosen to design the forthcoming new cover for McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy (sorry — it’s a secret for now), I came across this quote from Bucky.
When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
My quick take is that he’s talking about the broad strokes — ensuring an idea works before getting bogged down in the minutiae and finessing the details; the things that few notice, but are what help make something beautiful. It sounds just like something you might hear from Dieter Rams or Steve Jobs.