Jony Ive x 2

Am citit cartea lui Leander Kahney  înainte să citesc articolul din TIME despre el (care sună ca un exemplu clasic de „avem ceva de anunțat, stay tuned”). Cartea e mai mult despre Apple într-un fel dar e destul de interesantă chiar și-așa:

Apple nu face neapărat chestii noi, ci le face mai ușor de înțeles, folosit și le pune în mâinile mai multor oameni:

“Later, Jony explained his thinking this way. The computer industry “is an industry that has become incredibly conservative from a design perspective,” he said. “It is an industry where there is an obsession about product attributes that you can measure empirically. How fast is it? How big is the hard drive? How fast is the CD? That is a very comfortable space to compete in because you can say eight is better than six.” But Jony offered a key insight: “It’s also very inhuman and very cold. Because of the industry’s obsession with absolutes, there has been a tendency to ignore product attributes that are difficult to measure or talk about. In that sense, the industry has missed out on the more emotive, less tangible product attributes. But to me, that is why I bought an Apple computer in the first place. That is why I came to work for Apple. It’s because I’ve always sensed that Apple had a desire to do more than the bare minimum. It wasn’t just going to do what was functionally and empirically necessary.

Totul e documentat:

“Sketching is fundamental to their workflow. “I end up sketching everywhere,” said Stringer. “I’ll sketch on loose-leaf paper. I’ll sketch on models. I’ll sketch on anything I can put my hands on, quite often on top of CAD outputs for want of better things to do.” “When the group was designing the iMac, the table was covered with loose sheets of copy paper for sketching on, but Jony’s group moved on to use sketchbooks, often hardbound volumes from Cachet by Daler-Rowney, a small British company. The studio’s office supply stockroom is stacked with them. With bindings made of high-quality canvas, they don’t fall to pieces. Howarth and Jony chose blue sketchbooks about three times as thick as the Cachet sketchbooks, with ribbon markers. The sketchbooks make it easy to go back and look at earlier ideas, which is vital, as the group’s practice is to document everything generated during a brainstorm.

“A lot of sketching happens in these weekly sessions. At the end of the brainstorm, Jony will sometimes instruct everyone around the table to copy their sketchbooks and give the pages to the lead designer on the project under discussion; Jony will later sit with the lead designer and carefully go through all the pages. The lead and his two deputies will also pore through the pages trying to find ways to integrate new ideas. “Some days I’d be engaged and have ten pages of stuff,” Satzger remembered. “Sometimes you could feel when a designer wasn’t engaged in the material, when they weren’t filling up pages of things.”

Brushed aluminium is the new gold:

‘I have literally seen buildings where as far as the eye can see, where you can see machines carving, mostly aluminium, dedicated exclusively for Apple at Foxconn,’ said Guatam Baksi, a product design engineer at Apple from 2005 to 2010. ‘As far as the eye can see.’

Apple nu face decât trei tipuri de produse:

Unlike other electronics giants that make everything from computers to cameras to fridges, Apple makes and has only ever made three things: computers, entertainment devices and phones.