We make and sell a very, very large number of (hopefully) beautiful, well-made things. They care about things that are thoughtfully conceived and well made. But what we’ve shown is that people do care. It's tempting to think it’s because the people who use them don’t care - just like the people who make them. As Ive explains, this isn't an accident: "We’re surrounded by anonymous, poorly made objects. He makes products for people who care.Īpple's products look like they were made for humans. As Stanford design professor Tina Seelig says, creativity begins with observation - so when Ive wanted to learn more about an aspect of a design, he found the people who had the deepest experience with the material. When he wanted to learn how to make super-thin metal for laptops, he sought out Japanese metalworkers. To get the frosty color tones right for the iMac, Ive talked with jelly bean manufacturers. That follows the insight of Harvard Business School professor Clay Christensen: To make products people want, you have to understand the "job" that customers are hiring their purchases to do. After he's established the product's utility, he then begins to consider what it will actually look like. Whenever Ive starts working on a project, he imagines what the product might do for people. "The personal issues of ego have long since faded.” 4. That longevity means they can be completely honest: " We can be bitterly critical of our work," he says. More importantly, they've been working together for up to 20 years. Ive's design team is made up of only 15 or so members from the U.K., U.S., Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. He's worked with the same team for decades. "The reason is, it's the one place you can go and see everything we’re working on - all the designs, all the prototypes," Ive says. The philosophy is similar to that of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who doesn't allow anyone to visit the floor where the Amazon Kindle gets designed. No one except for Ive, his team, and top Apple execs get to set foot inside his lab at Apple headquarters. He keeps his workshop closed to anyone who doesn't need to be there. “Complete intrigue with the physical world starts by destroying it,” he says. Ive spent his childhood disassembling his family's things and putting them back together again. Ive gets his creative streak from his father, who was a silversmith and lecturer on craft and design at a local college. To understand the world, he's been wrecking it since he was a kid. Here are seven fascinating things that Ive revealed about his creative process: 1. This week, Time magazine published a rare interview with Ive, in which he discussed what influenced him and how he approaches his work. Along the way, he's become a living legend in the design world, dreaming up the candy-colored iMac, the music industry-disrupting iPod, and the world-changing iPhone - to name a few of the products that earned him his knighthood. Sir Jony Ive has led Apple's design team since 1996.
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