a conversation on design and responsibility with Sir Jony Ive
If I am anxious, you can see the anxiety in what I design, he said ruefully. I feel similarly about my writing.
On Wednesday May 7 I stopped by the Stripe Sessions conference in San Francisco to listen to a conversation between Sir Jony Ive and Stripe CEO Patrick Collison. For the uninitiated, Mr. Ive is a design titan whose creative vision and discipline led to the iPhone, iMac, iPod, iPad, and MacBook. During the talk, I typed notes on my MacBook while my iPhone rested on the empty seat next to me. These sculptural objects, and this man, brought design to the mass market and there he sat on stage. How thrilling!
Mr. Ive and Mr. Collison discussed the spirituality of a creative practice and the importance of caring for the end-user, and I was spell-bound. He’s a philosopher, I thought gleefully. Finally a Silicon Valley leader who I can relate to. Finally, a sensitive and profound soul who clearly possesses a rich inner-life. I felt as if Mr. Ive was speaking to me, and I was enamored.
Mr. Ive is a poet
When I hear corporate jargon or common turns of phrase I lose interest because I can sense that either the person is playing it safe and not letting me in or they have not given real thought to the question. It’s a cruel measurement I know and I do aspire to listening in-between the lines, but fear not because Mr. Ive did not require it.
He paused several seconds before answering each question and weighed his words carefully, not in a self-censorship kind of way but in a way that was refreshingly uncertain and poetic. He reminded me that what we choose to make is an expression of our values and the way we make is imbued into the object of our attention. If I am anxious, you can see the anxiety in what I design, he said ruefully. I feel similarly about my writing.
what will follow the iPhone?
Mr. Collison asked Mr. Ive point blank if he regretted the negative outcomes of smart phones. He responded with a sigh, I could not be more preoccupied or bothered by this. He admits that innovation has unintended consequences which does not excuse one of responsibility; this belief is nice to hear but what does it mean in practice? And besides, what is Mr. Ive responsible for, exactly?
While the answer remains unclear, his next endeavor with LoveFrom will be a response to what weighs heavily on him. His sentiments are fully captured in a few shorts words: I have no interest in breaking stuff for the sake of breaking stuff… breaking stuff and moving on quickly leaves us surrounded by carnage… So will his next product be a kind of dumb phone? A response to how smart phones have fragmented our attention and isolated us further? Will he possibly design a phone that requires less of our time and attention? I was heartened to not hear hubris in his words yet a conviction in what he is building next.
on joy
As of March my life has been filled with joy and romance. The joy of my wedding, of returning to a real design practice at Khan Academy, of food made from simple but fresh ingredients, of time in nature, of building a life with people I love, of making a cappuccino and sipping it while reading on creating things aesthetic and listening to soft Carnatic music. These days I am not sleep deprived or my mind drained. My social cup is full and I receive hugs and kisses as surely as the morning sun showers our hill with warm, holy light.
I have no need for vacation because life is life-giving. I am not anxious or depressed. I am more or less utterly satisfied. But these times will not last. There will be grief, pain, and disappointment, but today I feel I am on the other side of a tough journey. I have not won any award or recognition. It is a quiet victory only I know and it has no end. Then I wonder, what more is there to seek as a product designer? Where can my design practice go, exactly? I had previously channeled a dissatisfaction with life into my work, but now that life surpasses reward, I am free to design without fear of failure. Free to seek greatness. Ironic how that works.
I am, as you know, fixated on the ethics of design and technology. Who is harmed and who benefits are my first thoughts when building a product. What are the core values baked into this product, I wonder as I begin to design. Some days I am optimistic about designing responsible and ethical technology, these are the days I am in conversations with organizations like New_Public which is experimenting in pro-social online behaviors. Most days, however, I am cynical and trending towards Luddism.
Then along came Mr. Ive, offering me a fresh perspective on what design can mean: People think simple products are about moving out the clutter, but that just makes the product uncluttered. It just makes the product desiccated and soulless. That is what a lot of minimalism and modernism ends up being. I think my goal, our goal, is to bring order to chaos.
As many practitioners know, we do not always get to choose what we design. Is there still a way to identify the essence of that thing, even if you are not convinced of its need in the world? Even if it is a trivial piece of software, can you see the truth in it? And once you do, can you design an experience that is so elegant and genuinely hospitable to the end-user that you have somehow elevated everyone that comes in contact with your product?
If removing “stuff” is not really minimalism then my guess is minimalism is like writing a short story. You remove words until, in a stroke of inspiration, you have discovered the story you wanted to write. Perhaps minimalism is about having the intuition to know when you have removed the right amount of stuff. Perhaps it is the feeling you get when you read the shortest English story ever written: For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
I think the Apple’s rotten right to the core
After I left the conference hall and texted glowing reviews to friends, the enchantment of two well-spoken, capitalists began to fade. An unsettling feeling fell over me. Are these men really my heroes? Another day in Silicon Valley, another bow to a great man. I slowly walked home to North Beach.
When asked if there is a tradeoff between speed of execution and quality, Mr. Ive says that one does not have to choose. I know what that statement means. That statement means working on weekends and twelve to fourteen hour days. That statement means hyper-growth.
There is a beauty to working efficiently, and I would frame the issue as, how can we work wonderfully efficiently to create breathtaking quality? Mr. Ive has managed to accomplish exactly this, but at what cost I might ask? He is to be credited for Apple’s meteoric rise, so is he also to be held accountable for its labor practices and supply chain ethics? If a single human worker, let alone hundreds, commit or threaten suicide due to working conditions in a factory that manufactures your phones, was it worth it? Where is the beauty in that exactly?
This conversation about labor and ethics could not feel more pressing to me as I have been wrapping my head around global markets, the exploitation of workers in the developing world, and profit-driven environmental desecration. All three of these roads lead to the factories of Shenzhen. During the talk, Mr. Ive humorously derides the soullessness of conference rooms and instead asks, what if these conference chairs felt like the chairs in your living room? What a luxury it would be to live in a world where conferences are designed for comfort and pleasure, but I am much more interested in what Mr. Ive believes would make a factory assembly line more comfortable and pleasurable.
Judging by his words, he truly does care about people. He advocates for design teams that love one another and listen to the quietest voices. Form follows function yes, but it seems function follows a close understanding of people and culture. He wants us to design as if we are always designing for the people we love most. I was surprised by the humanity in his reframing of design excellence. I always think of designers like Mr. Ive as solemn, joyless men who wear all white or all black and prefer design that is exact and precise to design that is full of emotion, so here I am having my binary blown apart by the possibility that men like Mr. Ive do in fact feel and seek to design products that are both exact and soulful. This is what one might call mastery of the craft.
Socialist design
Mr. Collison asks Mr. Ive why, if he studied in the Bauhaus tradition which was a German art and design movement rooted in socialist values, why he then dedicated some much of his life to a capitalist project?
I was so pleased by this question because it looped us all the way back to the beginning of the conversation, where Mr. Collison asks Mr. Ive, why is Silicon Valley so ahistorical? Why do people working here not know its history? And how has Silicon Valley changed since Mr. Ive first arrived here? He answers that the Valley’s sense of service to humanity is missing. There are corporate agendas now, driven by money and power, he says sounding dejected. I could not agree more and was happy to hear his candor, but I would be foolish to not ask, how much of that corporate agenda did Mr. Ive benefit from? Did he turn a blind eye to? Might he continue to enable should he broker partnerships with OpenAI?
Is Apple or LoveFrom using design to improve the conditions of the working and middle class — the purported vision of the Bauhaus movement? Has Mr. Ive designed to meet the needs of the people instead of the need for luxury? Have his products been “tools for equity”? Has he actively educated, empowered, and bolstered a generation of designers so that they might rebuild a more just society? This last question sounds more to me like the life work of Virgil Abloh than Sir Jony Ive. You tell me if you see a difference between the two designers’ websites. While Mr. Abloh has sadly passed, his website remains a public library. His process, lectures, and knowledge all laid bare. If Mr. Abloh invites you into his archives Mr. Ive presents you with a wall behind which his secrets are kept safe.
I am in awe of Mr. Ive and I do not mean to disrespect his contributions to design. I cannot fathom the personal sacrifices and discipline it took for him to design and lead teams that would go on to elevate design worldwide. As a designer I am indebted to him for proving the business case of design which makes my life today possible. And yet I am left with a bitter taste in my mouth, like the last few dregs of matcha — if beauty is lovingly designed in California and begrudgingly made in China, have we mistaken a house of cards for a fortress that cannot be sieged?