Brought to you by First Official Guest Blogger, Nomi.
Within the constellation of stellar design talent working today, what sets a true innovator apart? One way to define design innovation is that it goes beyond aesthetic appeal or even functionality to completely reshape user experience or perception. With this in mind, you can't say "innovator" without mentioning Jonathan Ive, Senior Vice President of Design at Apple. A profile of Ive this week in the Guardian reveals the career path of this iconoclastic industrial designer whose work goes way beyond industrial design. With his small, intensely close-knit team of designers at Apple, Ive has been the mastermind of Apple's genre-defining products: the iMac series, the iPod, and now the iPhone.
Due to his extremely private nature and reluctance to give interviews, little is known about him apart from the legacy of his work. Fair enough, since his designs speak for themselves. Throughout his career, his work displays a common thread: the ability to design a user experience which serves to create an emotional bond with the product. He is also known for being open to inspiration in unexpected places. For his iMac design, with the goal of making personal computers fun and loveable instead of drab and depressing, he was inspired by the gel-clear colors and chubby, rounded edges of jellybeans. He and his team made many field trips to jellybean factories to take notes that informed the production of the iMac shell.
If you think about the collective consumer attitude towards owning a personal computer-any computer, not just a Mac-- the launch of the iMac is directly responsible for that. But as revolutionary as the iMac was, Ive then went on to design a product many people feel is even more emblematic of a generation: the iPod. I cannot think of a single better piece of shorthand for today's self-contained, user-centric ethos. If I had to put five contemporary designs in a time capsule to represent the "now," the iPod would definitely be one of them.
When Ive does speak about his work, he reveals a passionate sense of teamwork with the designers that work under him, and an egoless dedication to getting the product absolutely perfect. "One of the hallmarks of the team I think is this sense of looking to be wrong," Ive has said. "It's the inquisitiveness, the sense of exploration. It's about being excited to be wrong because then you've discovered something new."
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