Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [32]
Ive’s impromptu tour of the aluminum computer case reveals a lot about the design process that produced it: the drive to reduce and simplify, the attention to detail, and a respect for materials. Plus there’s Ive’s passion and drive. All of these factors contribute to his unique design process.
A Penchant for Prototyping
Ive and his wife, Heather, live with their young twins in a house near the top of Twin Peaks overlooking San Francisco. The house is described as “unostentatious,” but Ive drives a James Bond car—a $200,000 Aston Martin.
Ive originally wanted to design cars. He took a course at London’s Central Saint Martins Art School but found the other students too weird. “They were making ‘vroom, vroom’ noises as they did their drawings,” he said.18 He enrolled in a product design program at Newcastle Polytechnic instead.
It was at Newcastle that Ive developed a penchant for prototyping. Clive Grinyer, a fellow student and later one of Ive’s colleagues, remembers visiting Ive’s Newcastle apartment. He was flabbergasted to find it filled with hundreds of foamcore models of his final-year project: a hearing aid and microphone combination to help teachers communicate with deaf pupils. Most of the other design students built five or six models of their projects. Ive was “more focused than anyone I’d ever met on what he was trying to achieve,” Grinyer said.19
Oddly, Ive had no affinity for computers as a student. “I went through college having a real problem with computers,” Ive said. “I was convinced that I was technically inept.”20 But just before leaving Newcastle in 1989, he discovered the Mac. “I remember being astounded at just how much better it was than anything else I had tried to use,” he said. “I was struck by the care taken with the whole user experience. I had a sense of connection via the object with the designers. I started to learn more about the company: how it had been founded, its values and its structure. The more I learnt about this cheeky—almost rebellious—company, the more it appealed to me, as it unapologetically pointed to an alternative in a complacent and creatively bankrupt industry. Apple stood for something and had a reason for being that wasn’t just about making money.”
Over the years, computers have grown on him. In an interview with Face magazine, he explained that he’s fascinated by their multifunction nature. “There’s no other product that changes function like the computer,” he said. “The iMac can be a jukebox, a tool for editing video, a way to organize photographs. You can design on it, write on it. Because what it does is so new, so changeable, it allows us to use new materials, to create new forms. The possibilities are endless. I love that.”
After leaving Newcastle, Ive cofounded the Tangerine design collective in London in 1989, where he worked on a wide range of products, from toilets to hair combs. But he found contract work frustrating. As an outsider, he had little influence on the outcome of his ideas within the company.
In 1992, he got a call from Apple asking him to submit some concepts for early laptops. Apple was so impressed, Ive was hired as a designer and moved to California. But as Apple went into decline during this period, design was relegated to a dusty basement. Apple’s managers started to look to the competition for inspiration. They wanted focus groups. Ive came close to quitting. He worked independently and alone. He’d continue to design prototype products, but they rarely got any further than a shelf in his office. Jobs found Ive working by himself in his office, recognized his obvious talent, and promoted him.
Of course, things have been very different since Jobs returned. Ive is the same designer he used to