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Apple’s Jonathan Ive in Conversation with Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter

The full discussion from Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit is now available for streaming.

Released on 10/16/2014

Transcript

(piano music)

It's a good time to be Jonathan Ive.

He was knighted recently by the queen.

He's brought out two new Apple iPhones

to great acclaim.

He's got a watch coming out shortly.

Apple was just named the most valuable brand

in the world for the umpteenth time.

He's the greatest industrial designer

in the world right now.

What are the upsides and downsides

of being Johnny Ive right now?

Good Lord.

Well, the downside is I have to spend

much too much time with myself.

The upside is I've been terribly lucky.

I've been part of an incredible design team

for 15, 20 years.

A design team where nobody has voluntarily left.

I think in my future, one of my memories

at Apple will be less the actual products

that we've developed, but the way

that we developed them, the way that we

worked together to develop them.

I think that's been something that I

every day feel grateful for.

How big is the design team?

The sort of core group?

The core team is actually very small.

There are about 16, 17 of us.

It's grown steadily over the last 15 years.

We've worked very hard to keep it very small.

I am always fascinated what people's days are like.

You get in your car in San Francisco

and you drive to Cupertino each morning.

At the moment, it's taking about two hours.

What time is that?

That's about 7:30, eight o'clock.

You listen to music.

Actually, yeah, I sort of listen to music,

make phone calls.

You settle into the office at 8:30, 9:30?

Yeah, yeah.

Then what happens?

Well, the way that we've worked for,

one of the advantages of being part

of a design team that's been around

for a long time is that we've had the luxury

and the opportunity to develop our process.

One of the things that we do is we just,

we meet religiously, as the creative team,

three or four times a week.

That would look like it's the group

of designers working together, collaborating,

on whatever project that we're focused on.

Around a big table or something?

Yeah.

You familiar with the tables in our stores?

They look very, very similar.

In fact, they're identical to the tables

in our studio because we used to see

the products on the tables in the studio,

and actually thought, well, this would

actually be a rather nice way of displaying

the products in the store.

We sort of sit around, stand around those tables.

We draw.

We still draw.

For as long as I've been doing this,

I'm still so excited about just the nature

of the process.

I feel so absurdly lucky to be part

of a creative process where on one day,

on Tuesday, there's no idea.

We don't know what we're gonna do.

There's nothing.

Then on Wednesday, there's an idea

that was created.

Invariably, the idea is a thought

that becomes a conversation.

The way that we design, to start with,

(clears throat) is to talk.

It's fairly exclusive.

It only involves a few people.

A remarkable thing happens in the process.

It's the point in the process where

there is the greatest change.

It's when we give form to an abstract idea.

The abstract idea is fairly exclusive

and really doesn't involve very many people.

As soon as there's an object, it still.

You mean a physical object?

A physical object.

We will draw and we will make lots of,

we make a lot of models.

Made out of what?

It can depend what it is.

It can be metal or it can be a plastic.

But what I've noticed is this shift is profound.

It really galvanizes and provides a focus

to an entire team.

Very often when they're struggling

with these sort of abstract, tentative ideas,

suddenly, I think, you've got sort of a flag

that, in many ways, it won't become

the final design, or it very seldom does,

but what it does do is describe what

we're trying to do.

Can you remember sort of a eureka moment

in one of those design meetings?

I think the phone that we've just launched.

I think there is just something very special

about when you have an object.

We're physical beings, and when there's an object

to touch, everything shift.

It's always been the case.

What just shocks me is that I remain

surprised and thrilled every time

you get that first model.

In this phone, why did you go back

to rounded edges, which is, I guess,

the shape of the very first iPhone,

then you went to beautiful square edges?

You said because it was easier to pick up

or something.

What happened in the case of the phone

was many years ago, we made prototypes

of phones with bigger screens,

like we made notebooks with bigger screens.

It was a concept that we were familiar with.

They were interesting features,

having a bigger screen, but the end result

was a really lousy product because

they were big and clunky, like a lot

of the competitive phones are still. (laughter)

We thought there's a danger, isn't there?

You're seduced by a feature at the expense

of making a great product.

So years ago, we realized, well,

this is going to be important,

that we have larger screens, but we needed

to do a lot of things to make that

larger screen yield a really compelling product.

That ranged from how we would drive

the thickness, the weight.

But one of the things was when the product,

the product got necessarily wider because

it's a bigger display.

It was just very important that section

of the end, at the edges, was very important

to making it comfortable and actually

feeling less wide than in reality it was.

Then notion of you working inside.

When you say, What if we did this?

is that what you say?

Then somebody says, Well, we can work on that

and figure out how to make that work?

Yes.

These conversations are, they're so exciting.

They're nearly always the what if, could we,

what if we were to do this?

The important this is obviously you have

to be working with really great people.

It's a short conversation if it goes,

Well, if you can do this.

Oh, that won't work.

But if you're working with great people,

they're intrigued.

Very often it doesn't work,

but there's something else that does.

It's that collaboration.

What was the biggest what if,

where you said, Can we do this?

Then they said no, and you said,

Well, let's try.

Touch was a huge one because that required.

There were a thousand reasons and many occasions

when we nearly gave up.

You see, that's what I meant about

there's this strange inevitability thing

where you think, well, of course, the phone

makes senses and gets done, but we

nearly didn't because we didn't know

it was gonna work.

We're working on lots of programs,

and you really hope they are.

You have this very strange balance between being,

it might appear, a little bit stubborn.

I like to call it being resolute.

But really, really pushing and pushing

an idea, but at the same time,

realizing that it might not work.

At some point, you have to make that decision.

We nearly did on the phone.

That was a very big one.

On the watch that we've just recently announced,

there were many technologies that we

had to develop that started with the,

well, what if?

How could we do this?

Then making lots and lots of prototypes.

I wanna read ya two quotes from

two other legendary industrial designers.

One, Dieter Rams, who said that

the good design makes a product understandable,

and Raymond Loewy, who said that

more than function itself, simplicity

is the deciding factor in the aesthetic equation.

In a way, the iPhone is probably the most complex

machine any of us have held in our hands,

and yet, it came with no instructions.

[Jonathan] Right.

When did that come about?

That you could send out something

so incredible and complex, and with so many

varied functions, and no instructions?

Hopefully, that's what we try and do,

with varying degrees of success.

I think that for a lot of us, a large display

that you could directly touch and manipulate

what you wanted to manipulate seemed

the most obvious, natural, intuitively.

It is odd, though, that that's the case now.

It absolutely wasn't the case nine years ago

when we were working on it.

A strange thing happens with the benefit

of hindsight.

You sort of slide into this idea

that it was inevitable and obvious.

If it was inevitable and obvious,

we would have done it a long time ago, much faster.

It really wasn't.

It was an incredibly difficult--

Most phones were sort of shaped like

candy bars.

They were sort of roundish,

sort of Ericsson-type phones, or clamshells.

What was the thinking to then spread it out

and make it flat?

The main thing was, and I think

our observation was we'd been doing

a lot of work that was just abstract,

for many years, abstract explorations

into just multi-touch.

We had these just big displays

where you could pinch and zoom an image.

There wasn't one person who played with that

that wasn't completely captivated.

So from there grew this idea that.

Most products, up to that point in time,

make this massive trade-off.

They have buttons that were too small

to use comfortably and easily,

and a display that was too small,

but it was like that 'cause they had

to share the same space.

I don't know whether you, this is the way

that you guys perceive this, but this

was our a-ha, which was actually we didn't

have to compromise both.

By having a much larger display, we could have

buttons that were contextual,

that were specific to certain apps,

and they could be really big if you

only needed one button.

If you needed a lot of buttons,

they obviously would be smaller.

I think that just drove the display

being one single plane.

Just to go back a bit, what was the first

Apple product that you ever encountered

before you got to Apple?

It was actually when I was at art school.

It was in England, obviously. (laughter)

Tomato. (laughter)

It was at a time when computer-aided design

was being legislated.

The computers that the college had were,

they were absolutely terrible.

Because of that, I, of course, assumed

that the problem was with me, and that I

was technically incapable and inept.

It's a funny thing, actually.

I was talking to somebody last week about it,

which is if you eat something

that tastes awful, you assume the food's bad.

But when you use a product

that you can't use, you don't assume

it's the product.

You assume it's you, don't you?

I went through art school convinced that

I didn't know how to use this, but right

at the end, I came across the Mac.

It was the first, the all in one, boxy one.

There were a couple of things that

were really shocking to me.

The first one was, well, it was a relief,

actually, more than shocking,

which was actually I could do this.

It was really straightforward.

It was just the other computers

were just heinous.

But the second thing, and it's an

embarrassing admission, given how long

I'd already been at art school,

and I remember it ever so clearly to the day.

That was, I, for the first time in my life,

had a very clear sense of the people

that had got together to design

and make that product.

I suddenly realized, oh, goodness,

the stuff that we do testifies to our values.

It testifies to our preoccupations

and the things that we care about.

It was, from that point, developed

a real interest and intrigue about

this group of guys in California

that made the computer that you could change

the noises, 'cause no other computer

you could make it beep or bong.

I was absolutely intrigued by that,

this really clear sense.

I wanted to find out who did this.

But you were on a road to become

an industrial designer.

Why that, rather than a graphic designer

or an artist?

Honestly, it was the only thing I could do.

I think so much about industrial design

is this sense of service, that what we do,

we make tools for each other.

So the goal, unlike fine art, it's not about

developing a strong narrative or self-expression.

We try and make tools that make things,

make life a bit easier.

I do think that's quite noble,

and I liked that idea.

It's a relatively young profession.

It felt that there was an awful lot

of opportunity, still.

Seeing as I've always just liked,

all design really is is drawing and making stuff.

I enjoyed doing that.

What sort of things did you like as a kid

that you thought were beautifully designed?

There was one thing I remember very clearly

that my mother and father had.

I don't know if you guys, you didn't know Braun,

the German appliance manufacturer.

They had a big food mixer.

As a little fella who had absolutely

no interest in food mixing or cooking,

I was shocked at the interest I had

in this object and how it was made

and how extraordinarily, achingly beautiful it was.

I didn't really know what it did,

but I somehow assumed it did it very well.

Hi.

My question is, there is a company in China,

a mobile company.

It's called Xiaomi.

A lot of journalists here call it

the Apple of China because they think that

your design is alike, and they really like

calling it the Chinese Apple.

What do you think of these comparisons?

Do you find them flattering?

Do you find them complimenting you

on the great style?

Honestly, there's a danger.

I'll sound a little bit harsh

and perhaps a little bit bitter

'cause I actually don't see it as flattery.

I'm just talking about this issue in general.

I actually see it as theft because

when you're doing something for the first time,

for example with the phone, and you

don't know it's gonna work.

I was describing about this sort of wrestle.

You don't know it's gonna work.

You spend seven or eight years working

on something, and then it's copied.

I have to be honest.

The first thing I think isn't oh,

that was flattering. (laughter)

All those weekends I could have had at home

with my lovely family, but didn't,

but the flattery make up for it. (laughter)

I think it's really straightforward.

It really is theft and it's lazy.

I don't think it's okay at all.

(applause)

Hi, I'm Hillary.

I'm also an MFA student at Academy of Art.

My question focuses on the balance

between the functionality of your products

and also the design.

As you probably know, there's a large body

of research that focuses on aesthetic perception

of information technology artifacts,

and how if something is perceived as beautiful,

that it's also perceived as having higher quality

and, inevitably, better usability.

This is actually something that a lot

of technology companies struggle with,

where they might make a beautiful product,

but it doesn't function well.

Apple seems to have succeeded,

both having that balance of a beautiful product,

but also great functionality.

I was wondering, in comparison

with other technology companies, how does Apple

successfully strike that balance between

functionality and design?

It's a great question.

I think the way we see design

is it's everything.

I think a beautiful product that

doesn't work very well is ugly.

Can't really compartmentalize.

The best things we've done are those

that are completely harmonious, and you

couldn't compartmentalize.

I think design is the whole thing.

I think very often the beauty

is in that it works, and perhaps not the appearance.

Perhaps this gentleman over here?

Yes, I was wondering if you had examples

today of things that you thought

were really great design, where those

two factors work together?

That's a really hard question

because I'm terribly, terribly critical. (laughter)

I'm very critical of ourselves.

I get a lot of email of people being critical.

Some of them, I know, think, oh,

I've really got him on that.

They couldn't hold a light to the self-criticism.

I think what, in sort of a broader sense.

Actually, I think Ben mentioned earlier on,

he was saying about how really thinking

that consumers are really discerning.

One of the things that I've come to feel

really strongly is I believe that we sense,

we couldn't articulate why, I can't

articulate why, but I believe we sense

when there's been care taken with a product.

Just in the same way we sense carelessness.

Sadly, most of our manufactured environment,

I think, testifies to a degree of carelessness.

It testifies to get it built fast,

make it cheap, make it look different.

There's just that sort of carelessness.

I don't know.

I just think it's one of the things

that we do, one of the things that we strive

to do for humanity is, and it's a way

that we can serve, is to take care.

There used to be this whole debate.

England industrialized first.

(laughter)

Didn't we do well?

There was a guy called Pugin, who really

led a movement which was articulating

the evils of mass production, and was saying

that it was Godless and it was without integrity.

I think that was absolutely ridiculous

because you can make something

as a craftsperson poorly, without care,

and you can make something in high volume

with incredible care, and obviously vice-versa.

(electronic music)

Starring: Jony Ive, Graydon Carter

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