Jonny Apple seed
Jonathan Ive was onstage, lovingly dismantling an iBook laptop in front of an audience of enraptured designers. For more than an hour, he handled the object, describing the journey of its creation, revealing the elegant necessity of every curve, hinge and surface.
Jonathan Ive, senior vice-president of industrial design at Apple Computer, poses with an iBook laptop. |
The laptop uncovered, he pointed to a tiny, bespoke tool-set built into the rear casing, a delight for any service engineer. Meticulous attention to detail has become a hallmark of Ive's work, but contemporaries describe his talent as more profound than that.
As senior vice-president of industrial design at Apple Computer in Cupertino, California, the 39-year-old British-born Ive is widely regarded as certainly the most important British designer of our time.
From a studio at the company's headquarters, Jonathan Ive and his small team of trusted designers have defined the look of a generation, first with the iBook and iMac, and latterly the ubiquitous iPod range, whose owners include the Queen, Tony Blair and George Bush.
Beyond Ive's talent, he is famous for his privacy. He gives interviews rarely. Apple says it does not have his precise date of birth. His Who's Who entry states only that he was born in 1967, and fails to mention he is the father of twins. What has emerged is that he is thoughtful, brutally honest, passionate and self-deprecating.
He lives modestly in a two-bedroom house in Twin Peaks, a district outside San Francisco, with his wife, Heather, a historian. He counts Paul Smith and DJ John Digweed among his friends. His one concession to luxury appears to be an Aston Martin, bought more for its looks than its symbolism.
Talented student
Born in Chingford, east of London, to a teacher turned school inspector, Ive went to Newcastle Polytechnic (now Northumbria University) in northeastern England, to study industrial design. He immediately displayed enormous talent. He would seek out unusual influences for his designs, but had an instinctive ability to combine them into products that captured the zeitgeist.
For his final-year project, Ive developed an alternative monetary system, a pebble-like object which could be charged up and used instead of cash or credit cards. It was a groundbreaking idea.
"It is a unique capacity that he has. You see his kind of talent probably once in a lifetime of teaching students," said Bob Young, who taught Ive during his degree course at Newcastle.
In 1989, Ive graduated with first class honours, his mark far, far beyond the 70 percent needed to make the grade. A year later, he joined the London design company Tangerine and worked on projects from toilets to video cassette recorders.
Before pitching designs for a new bathroom suite to the UK-based company Ideal Standard, he bought marine biology books and scoured them for influences from nature.
"He's particularly good on a broad basis, in that he can work on anything," said Martin Darbyshire, chief executive of Tangerine. "If you look at the work he did here, it still looks contemporary. He has a gift of not putting too much in, which is a danger for many designers."
Apple genius
Ive joined Apple in 1992, when the company was in disarray, and at first found the work frustrating. His rise to public prominence coincided with the return to Apple of ebullient chief executive Steve Jobs, who reinvigorated the company he helped found.
He later joined the board, where his ability and track record have earned him unprecedented trust.
Ive's first major success, the colorful all-in-one iMac computer, was inspired by the glistening transparency of gumdrops, and came as a reaction against the blandness of the beige desktop computers that dominated offices worldwide. But contemporaries claim his greatest design success as the iPod, the MP3 player which has sold millions of units and become a classic.
The iPod, a clean, easy-to-use white box, arrived on the market just as the digital music revolution took hold and helped cement Apple's leadership.
Ive's Who's Who entry joins a long list of plaudits. In 2003 he won the Design Museum's inaugural designer of the year competition, being named the most influential designer for the iMac and iPod.
"Jonathan Ive defines the look of the generation," said David Kester, chief executive of the UK Design Council. "He is the quintessential industrial designer. And he knows more than anyone what we're going to be holding in our hands five years from now."
The Guardian
(China Daily 01/12/2007 page19)
