Great piece for The Wirecutter by Allison Gibson, talking about what defines quality. She interviewed and pulled quotes from several designers. What Allison gleaned from Maria Popova was great:
“Quality is, of course, enormously subjective,” [Popova] tells me. “It’s what something gives and means to us, not an absolute. Brian Eno has said that we confer value on things, and it’s the act of conferring that makes things valuable—I believe this is true of quality, too.”
For her, the kinds of things to look for when assigning value this way include timelessness, beauty, honesty, simplicity, ethicality and joy. “There must be joy,” she says. “Otherwise, we conflate quality with convenience.”