An interview by HufNews’s correspondent, with Jonathan Paul Ive, one of apple’s industrial designers.
-What are your thoughts on Apple’s design team?
< We’re a small design team. We’ve worked together for over 25 years. One of the things that we’ve learned is the importance of listening, because, as we all know, the very best ideas can very often come from the quietest voice. Ideas are extremely fragile. Ideas are not predictable in terms of when you’ll have them and how many you’re going to have. And so over the years, we’ve really created a team and an environment that I think really increases the probability of good ideas, and when they actually arrive, I think nurtures them.
The design studio really is a workshop. We design three-dimensional objects, and we make lots and lots of models and prototypes. Designing and making, really should be inseparable. For every finished product that you see, tools had to be designed, process had to be created and experimented with. We’ve worked very hard to create a singular studio that has all of these different facets.
The hallmark of the group has been to be inquisitive and ask an awful lot of questions. We have really made it a practice to just have our heads down and work and ignore, in some senses, all the reasons why something shouldn’t be possible. This book captures a point in time of incredible transitions and quite shocking change. You understand the nature of an object so much more when you understand how it came to be. The book tells dozens and dozens of stories. You see momentum; you see learning. Of course, as designers, you live in the future. It’s not that we are not interested in the work we’ve done before, it’s just we are so consumed by what we haven’t done yet.>
