Watch this video about Jonathan Ives, the industrial designer behind Apple’s success.
Two things I think are interesting about it. Firstly how he describes the process of design and production, and how he stresses the subtlety of the result.
‘So many of the products we’re surrounded by, they want you to be very aware of how the solution was arrived at. When the indicator comes on, I wouldn’t expect anyone to point to that as a feature, but at some level I think you’re aware of a calm, and considered solution that therefore speaks about how you’re going to use it, not the terrible struggles that we as designers and engineers have in trying to solve some of the problems’
In order to create great design one has to understand how the process of creation will happen. I think that some architects make the mistake of thinking that they have to ‘redesign the wheel’ when they design buildings – they are pushing to do new, ‘innovative’ things.
However I think this can have a downside if these things do not emerge from a process that either exists already or is a designed improvement on what is already there. One can look at the range of products designed by Ive and his team and see them as a series of revolutions, but in fact they are evolutions.
‘A lot of what we are doing with a product like that is getting design out of the way.’
How does your design process interact with the process of creating buildings, and how can you make this work better?
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