Apple’s design guru Jonathan Ive, who receives a knighthood today for creating products such as the iPad, tells Shane Richmond why this country’s industrial heritage lies behind his succes.
Just one person looks twice at Jonathan Ive as we walk through the Apple store in London’s Covent Garden and that’s a member of staff. The customers are oblivious to the presence of the man responsible for the design of the computers, iPads, iPhones and iPods that they are admiring, tapping and caressing throughout the shop.
Ive, a softly spoken, thoughtful Brit, has worked at Apple in California since 1992, and since 1997 has been in charge of its designs. This may well make him the most influential designer in the world. In creating the iPod he unleashed a product that profoundly altered the music industry, while the iPhone is doing the same to the mobile phone industry. The most recent product from his team, the iPad, is setting the standard for an entirely new category of computer.
His incredible run of success has made him revered in the design community and helped him to amass a fortune in excess of £80 million. Even so, he says, he isn’t recognised all that often. “People’s interest is in the product, not in its authorship,” he says.
Considerably more people will know Ive’s face after today, when he is to be knighted for services to design and enterprise. The honour, he says, is “incredibly humbling”.
“All I’ve ever wanted to do is design and make; it’s what I love doing. It’s great if you can find what you love to do. Finding it is one thing but then to be able to practise that and be preoccupied with that is another,” he says. “I’m very aware of an incredible tradition in the UK of designing and making, and so to be recognised in this way is really wonderful.”
Ive was born in 1967 in Chingford, Essex, but raised in Staffordshire, where he went to Walton High School, a large comprehensive in Stafford. He says his father, a teacher, was a significant influence on his decision to pursue design. “My father was a very good craftsman. He made furniture, he made silverware and he had an incredible gift in terms of how you can make something yourself.”
Ive talks about Apple’s attention to detail in its products – details that often won’t be seen by consumers at all – as a desire to “finish the back of the drawer”. “We do it because we think it’s right,” he says. The seed of that idea was planted while watching his father work. “Growing up, I enjoyed drawing but it was always in the service of an idea. I drew all the time and I enjoyed making.”
He studied design at Newcastle Polytechnic, now Northumbria University, where he still returns frequently to give guest lectures. “One of the things that was interesting about my time at the school of art and design is that you were in very close proximity to graphic designers, fashion designers and fine art students. That’s one of the things that really characterised my time at college and I think it characterises a lot of the energy and vitality in London, this density of such creative diversity.”
It was while he was at university that Ive first encountered an Apple Mac. Having considered himself to be technically inept, he was amazed to find a computer that he could use. “I suddenly realised that it wasn’t me at all. The computers that I had been expected to use were absolutely dreadful.”
That experience made Ive curious about Apple and the people behind it. Later, at Tangerine, the design agency he co-founded, he worked for Apple as a consultant. Twenty years ago, he moved to California to join the company full time. Despite that, he says, he is “definitely the product of a very British design education”.
“Even in high school I was keenly aware of this remarkable tradition that the UK had of designing and making. It’s important to remember that Britain was the first country to industrialise, so I think there’s a strong argument to say this is where my profession was founded.”
Ive’s design studio, on Apple’s Cupertino campus, a short drive from the San Francisco home where he lives with his British wife, Heather, and two children, is shrouded in secrecy. Only select employees are even allowed inside the office, which has tinted windows and is filled with machines for designing and prototyping Apple’s various products.
The sight of the shaven-headed, muscular designer might lead you to expect a brusque, tough character. Apple has a reputation as a challenging company to work for, an image illustrated in Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, the late co-founder, which told of employees reduced to tears in bitter rows.
And yet Ive appears to be quite a gentle person. There are long pauses after each of my questions as he considers his answer and orders his thoughts. When he talks about his work with Apple, he almost always talks about “we”, rather than “I”. Everything he says emphasises the teamwork involved in producing products such as the iMac, the candy-coloured computer that relaunched Apple on the path to success, or the iPad, the tablet that has redefined the way people use computers. Certain words come up time and again, particularly “simplicity” and “focus”.
“We try to develop products that seem somehow inevitable. That leave you with the sense that that’s the only possible solution that makes sense,” he explains. “Our products are tools and we don’t want design to get in the way. We’re trying to bring simplicity and clarity, we’re trying to order the products.
“I think subconsciously people are remarkably discerning. I think that they can sense care.”
The care that goes into Apple’s products is something that Ive speaks about earnestly. It’s a principle that he traces back to the industrial revolution. “One of the concerns was that there would somehow be, inherent with mass production and industrialisation, a godlessness and a lack of care.
“I think it’s a wonderful view that care was important – but I think you can make a one-off and not care and you can make a million of something and care. Whether you really care or not is not driven by how many of the products you’re going to make.”
“We’re keenly aware that when we develop and make something and bring it to market that it really does speak to a set of values. And what preoccupies us is that sense of care, and what our products will not speak to is a schedule, what our products will not speak to is trying to respond to some corporate or competitive agenda. We’re very genuinely designing the best products that we can for people.”
In black and white, those sentiments sound idealistic, the kind of thing about which it is easy to be cynical. Like every other electronics manufacturer, Apple has faced questions in recent months over the working conditions in the Far East factories where its products are assembled.
Apple has attempted to show that it cares for its workers just as it cares for its customers and products. A detailed series of audits has, Apple says, led to improved standards in the factories it uses and the company argues that it monitors its suppliers more openly and more thoroughly than the competition.
Ive and his team don’t just design the products that Apple makes. The ideas are often so new that frequently they have to design the entire production process that the factories will use to make them.
Ive has achieved an awful lot and still has a long career ahead of him. Even so, a knighthood is a good time to take stock. If he was to be remembered for just one of his Apple designs, I ask, which one would he pick?
There is the long pause. “It’s a really tough one. A lot does seem to come back to the fact that what we’re working on now feels like the most important and the best work we’ve done, and so it would be what we’re working on right now, which of course I can’t tell you about.”
Apple is famous for its secrecy about future products. I ask what will happen if the Queen asks about the new iPhone today. Will he have to say, “I’m sorry Your Majesty, we don’t comment on forthcoming products”?
“That would be funny,” he laughs.
But I notice he doesn’t say no.
