TOUCH OF GENIUS 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? W o r d s S T E P H E n B AY L E Y
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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
We control fuel injection with an accelerator pedal. That’s similar to the designer’s role 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.’ 22 / goodwood the season
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