Jony Ive Senior VP Design, Apple: Good is the Enemy of Great

Jony Ive is bringing his design talents to… Airbnb

Jony Ive on design: ‘The most important thing is that you care’

The goal isn’t to make money

Apple’s goal is not to make money, but to make good products, said Jonathan Ive, senior vice president of industrial design at Apple Inc. We are really pleased with our revenues but our goal isn’t to make money. It sounds a little flippant, but it’s the truth. Our goal and what makes us excited is to make great products. If we are successful people will like them and if we are operationally competent, we will make money, he said.

Good design — innovation — is really hard, said Ive, explaining how it is possible to be both a craftsperson and a mass manufacturer with discipline and focus. We say no to a lot of things that we want to do and are intrigued by so that we only work on a manageable number of products and can invest an incredible amount of care in each of them.

He talked about artist Augustus Pugin, who famously rallied against mass production during the industrial revolution. Pugin felt there was a godlessness in making things in volume. He was completely wrong. You can make one chair carelessly, thoughtlessly, that is valueless. Or you can make a phone [that will eventually go on to be mass produced] and invest so many years of care and have so many people so driven to make the very best phone way beyond any sort of functional imperative that there is an incredible value.

He said: Really great design is hard. Good is the enemy of great. Competent design is not too much of a stretch. But if you are trying to do something new, you have challenges on so many axes.

Ive added that he can’t describe how excited he still feels to be part of the creative process. To me, I still think it’s remarkable that at a point in time on a Tuesday afternoon there isn’t an idea and then suddenly, later on, there is an idea.

Invariably they start as a tentative, barely-formed thought that becomes a conversation between a couple of people.

Ive also expressed some unhappiness that designers are moving away from physical interactions with materials and toward conceptualizing products almost entirely in computer modeling programs.

Jony Ive on design | Charlie Rose

Now we have people graduating from college, who don’t know how to make something themselves. It’s only then that you understand the characteristics of a material and how you honor that in the shaping. Until you’ve actually pushed metal around and done it yourself, you don’t understand it completely.

Of the process that goes into shaping devices like the iPhone, Ive said that the critical aspects are care and effort. The designer noted that the most important thing is that you actually care, that you do something to the best of your ability.

Ive was knighted in 2011 in recognition of his services to design and enterprise. In 2012, the entire 16-person Apple design team accepted an award for being the best design studio of the last 50 years. Earlier in 2013, Ive accepted a Blue Peter badge from the Children’s BBC, an award given out previously to personalities such as David Beckham, JK Rowling, Tom Daley, Damian Hirst, and The Queen.

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