QUOTE: The danger in relying on [sophisticated virtual design tools] too much is that we can end up isolated from the physical world. In our quest to quickly make three-dimensional objects, we can miss out on the experience of making something that helps give us our first understandings of form and material, of the way a material behaves—’I press too hard here, and it breaks here’ and so on…It’s very hard to learn about materials academically, by reading about them or watching videos about them; the only way you truly understand a material is by making things with it.

—Jonathan Ive, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Design, discussing materials and the iPhone 4

[I mentioned this before. Living only in a digital, virtual world lacks balance and doesn’t engage senses that we’ve developed over lifetimes.]

Source: SIGNAL VS. NOISE