"Design Principles: The Studio of Jobs and Ive" in Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs

I was interested in finding out if Walter Isaacson would talk about the connection between design, production and marketing in his biography of Steve Jobs. I suspected that Apple was a perfect example of the close relationship between marketing and design that Seth Godin espoused in Purple Cow.

I've only dipped into it, but the first chapter I chose to read was "Design Principles," and in it, Isaacson does make that connection.

When Jobs returned to Apple, Jonathan Ive was already working there as a designer but was thinking about leaving: he didn't like the way that production and design was organized. After Jobs left, design became an afterthought. Engineers designed the inside of products, according the specifications of function they had also designed, and the job of the design department was to make a case that would fit.

After Jobs returned, design returned to its former role where the design of the product was paramount and the engineers were required to make the components fit - and function - in the case created by the design department.

Jobs was passionate about design, grew close to Ive, and gave him independence in the company structure so that, as Jobs said, "There's no one who can tell him what to do, or to butt out. That's the way I set it up."

Ive was influenced by a designer for Braun, Dieter Rams, whose personal design philosophy was summed up in the phrase, "Less but better." Similarly, Ive and Jobs sought the simplest design that was still functional. What Ive says about this is fascinating to me, and I'm not sure I understand it, and I certainly didn't expect it:

"Why do we assume that simple is good? Because with physical products, we have to feel we can dominate them. As you bring order to complexity, you find a way to make the product defer to you. Simplicity isn't just a visual style. It's not just the minimalism of the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. For example, to have no screws on something, you can end up having a product that is so convoluted and so complex. The better way is to go deeper with the simplicity, to understand everything about it and how it's manufactured. You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential."

Isaacson explains that Jobs and Ive believed that design was not just the surface of the product, or the way that it looked, but its essence, which includes its function.

In the design of the PowerMacs, for instance, there was "total collaboration" between the designers, the product developers, the engineers, and the manufacturing team as the design went through many iterations.

Ive told Isaacson a story about his visit to kitchen supply store in France with Jobs. They both admired a knife but as they picked it up to look at it more closely, they saw a tiny bit of glue between the handle and the blade. That kind of detail revealed a lot about how the knife was manufactured and represented the opposite of what Jobs and Ive strove for: "products should be made to look pure and seamless."

In Ive's studio, there's a room with computers on which the designers design the models. There's a another room, next to it, a "molding" room in which the computer designs are turned into models. Next to the molding room is another room for spray painting the molds.

Jobs visited the design studio many days; he examined the different iterations of the model and made comments or involved other staff from outside the design department in questions of manufacture or strategy that arose from the design.

Ive said about this, "Much of the design process is a conversation, a back-and-forth as we walk around the tables and play with the models.. There are no formal design reviews, so there are no huge decision points. Instead, we can make the decisions fluid. Since we iterate every day and never have dumb-ass presentations, we don't run into major disagreements."

Isaacson adds that the "packaging of Apple signaled that there was a beautiful gem inside," and that seems to me to be another example of almost seamless integration, here of marketing and design.

Perhaps my view of this is exaggerated, but elsewhere in the book I read that Jobs forced folks from different departments to work together as teams, and furthermore, required that profit and loss be reported only for the company as a whole - not for each department. I think his attitude about the profit and loss reporting might be a reflection of how united he felt that the departments should be because he wanted to foster an operational process in which marketing, engineering and product design were almost unified.