#Apple product design has since jony series

Just to prove he still could.Ī love of making is something he shared with Jobs, Apple’s former chief executive who died three years ago. I couldn’t get the mainspring rewound.” Thirty years later, he did the same to his iPhone one day. Radios were easy, but “I remember taking an alarm clock to pieces and it was very difficult to reassemble it.

“Complete intrigue with the physical world starts by destroying it,” he says. Ive spent his childhood taking apart the family’s worldly goods and trying to put them back together again. He was a silversmith who later became a lecturer in craft, design and technology at Middlesex Polytechnic. He inherited his craftsman’s skills from his father, Michael. Ive has been a maker ever since he could wield a screwdriver.

There is a resurgence of the idea of craft.” “I want to know what things are for, how they work, what they can or should be made of, before I even begin to think what they should look like. You understand a product if you understand how it’s made,” he says. “Objects and their manufacture are inseparable.

#Apple product design has since jony series

He likes the idea of this interview series because he sees himself as more of a maker than a designer. Ive is in a good mood today - and not just because he’s celebrating his 47th birthday. “I can’t even bring myself to say math, instead of maths, so I say mathematics. He speaks slowly and softly in an Essex accent totally unaffected by living in America for more than two decades. He’s not particularly tall, is well built and bald(ish), has two-day-old stubble and dresses like dads do on weekends - navy polo shirt, canvas trousers, desert boots. You might think you’d recognize him if you passed him on the street, but you wouldn’t. Ive is the most unremarkable remarkable person you could meet. Thanks for coming,” grins Ive, as he rolls in, picking up his brew. But just after 10AM, an Apple tech-head appeared in an all-white meeting room on the first floor of building 4 of the firm’s antiseptic headquarters with strict instructions to find an Earl Grey tea bag. Interstate 280 South to Silicon Valley was a river of water, instead of the usual lava streaks of stop-start SUVs. It had not rained properly in California for months but that morning the clouds rolled off the Pacific, turning the Golden Gate Bridge black. Jobs didn’t like Apple execs doing interviews. The gods - or was it the ghost of Steve Jobs? - seemed against it. But last month, he invited me to Cupertino in Silicon Valley where Apple is based, for his first in-depth interview since he became head of design almost 20 years ago.

For years, Ive’s natural shyness, coupled with the secrecy bordering on paranoia of his employer, Apple, has meant we have known little about the man who shapes the future, with such innovations as the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. Some of us like his screens more than our families. Many of us spend more time with his screens than with our families. We use Jonathan Ive’s products to help us to eat, drink and sleep, to work, travel, relax, read, listen and watch, to shop, chat, date and have sex.