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Jonathan Ive talks to Stephen Bayley about good design ahead of being a judge at Cartier's concours d'elegance at the Goodwood Festival of Speed
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22 / goodwood the season
J o n a t h a n I v e turned a base MP3 player
into industrial gold. Jony, as his friends know him,
was born in Chingford, Essex, in 1967. He is polite,
enthusiastic, self-deprecating, articulate and very
smart. And he is perhaps Apple’s greatest asset.
Ive moved to California in 1992 and toiled in
a struggling business. Five years later Steve Jobs
returned to the company he had founded and was
desperate for invigorating novelty. Jobs interviewed
the celebrity designers of the day: Ettore Sottsass,
Giorgetto Giugiaro and Richard Sapper. Instead,
he found Ive {fig.1} in-house and kept him there.
Slowly at first, but then ever more quickly, Ive
oversaw the introduction of new products that
redefined consumer expectations. Jobs says you
know a design is good if you want to lick it and,
one assumes, a great deal of licking takes place
at Apple headquarters in Cupertino.
But what’s interesting is the way Ive achieves
this. He does not start out to make a slick package.
Instead, he wants to understand the expressive
limits of materials. He understands coatings,
milling, forging, moulding and bonding.
Ive believes if you know how something is made,
you understand everything about it: ‘I’ve always
been fascinated by the old-school approach to
making things. Take stainless steel: you can
transform it from a modest material to a thing of
beauty by a process. I find that inspiring.’
This is what the consumer intuits: an Apple
product is, at least until its successor, the ultimate
expression of contemporary possibilities. Perfection
may be difficult, but Ive says: ‘You can reach a
point where you cannot use resources any better.’
I asked Jony if there was such a subject as
design and he said: ‘The problem with the word
“design” is that it means so much and it means
so little. I always struggle to define it. It’s an
activity more than an end result.’
I also wondered how he reconciles a personal
passion for extravagant cars with his disciplined
aesthetic? Ive explained: ‘Cars of the Fifties and
Sixties had a fluency about how materials should
best be used. Look at a Jaguar and you’ll see the
dashboard was a flat wooden plank. Look inside
a typical modern car and ask yourself, why is it
like that? To say “I like it” is just not good enough.’
Cars provide another creative metaphor: ‘We
control fuel injection by the use of an accelerator
pedal. That’s similar to the designer’s role. It’s
the responsibility of the designer to make things
simple and comprehensible.’
A billion happy Apple consumers in thrall to Ive
demonstrate what aesthetes and ideologues have
struggled to prove: beautiful, intelligent products
sell. The consumer is not a moron, after all.
Arthur C. Clarke said that any technology,
sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from
magic. According to Ive, ‘When we were developing
the iPad, we spoke in exactly those terms!’
Still, not everything in Jony’s world is
perfect. After this conversation I sent him a
thank-you message from my iPad and the
infuriating autocorrect system made him I’ve.
Writer and broadcaster Stephen Bayley was the
founding director of the Design Museum, London
TOUCH OF GENIUS
W o r d s S T E P H E n B AY L E Y
What does Jonathan Ive – Apple maverick and one of this year’s judges of Cartier’s
concours d’elegance at the Goodwood Festival of Speed – believe makes good design?
We control fuel injection with an accelerator pedal. That’s similar to
the designer’s role
fig.1