Yesterday I pointed to Joel Spolsky thoughtful post on simplicity. I found an interesting IHT article by Alice Rawsthorn about Apple’s take on functional aesthetics. It supports Joel’s point of view. In the article, Jonathan Ive, SVP of Industrial Design at Apple summarizes the Apple philosophy:
“A huge amount of what we try to do is simplification, solving very complex problems without making the complexity evident,” he said. “In so many products you see the designer wagging his or her tail in your face. Our obsession is being very, very pure and inevitable, in some cases getting design out of the way.”
Apple has been an icon of good design these last 20 years. But Alice sounds a warning:
[Apple] has also proved repeatedly, as Olivetti did with office equipment and Braun with electrical appliances during the 1960s, that people are willing to pay more for an object, if it is so well designed that they really, really want it. That said, no company rests on its design laurels for long. Who would cite Olivetti or Braun as role models of design today? And Apple is entering a challenging time. If the blogs are right, it is finalizing plans to go into the cellphone market early next year with the iPhone. And having striven to establish its design supremacy in aesthetics and usability, Apple now needs to do so in sustainability to ward off attacks from environmental groups.
e8g6voxta4xh7jk2
e8g6voxta4xh7jk2