
Jonathan Ive on Industrial Design - g0atbutt
http://codesketch.com/2010/04/jonathan-ive-on-industrial-design/
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ZeroGravitas
I'm a big fan of his work, but I feel minimalism can easily be taken too far.
Does an indicator not need to be visible when it's off? How do you confirm
that it is off. Yes, you'll eventually learn where it is by repeated exposure
to it when it's on but there will still be some uncertainty even then,
especially if you deal with multiple machines.

Personally I _like_ that minimalism and want it in the products I buy, but I'd
not go so far as to say it's more usable than a more prosaic alternative where
you have a row of cheap indicator leds with little pictograms next to them.

Reminds me of this comic strip too:

<http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/3/6/>

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ugh
I don’t know. This LED has one function: telling you the device is still on
when the monitor isn’t. That’s all it does. It’s obvious that the device is on
when the monitor is on, so you don’t need a LED for that (ThinkPads really do
have a frickin’ LED for that! As does my cheap Compaq.).

Putting a LED at a visible location and making it invisible as long as it is
off seems like a pretty elegant solution to that problem. I don’t think it’s
harder to figure out the sleep light than this whole row of LEDs on my old
ThinkPad with their cryptic pictograms or the dazzling array of blinkenlights
on my cheap Compaq laptop (complete with equally puzzling pictograms and
including LEDs which light up in different colors so you presumably have to
learn a whole color code).

Macs in general only opt for LEDs when displaying stuff in the UI is not
possible (sleep light and battery indicator for checking battery status when
the Mac is off), one exception being that darned caps lock. Spotlight’s icon
pulses when your HDD is indexed. There are progress bars when stuff is
unzipped or copied. Why the need for a HDD activity LED?

That’s a bit dishonest of me. There is multitasking, so stuff might be going
on in the background, but I do think that in general it’s good to strive for a
world in which we don’t need HDD activity LEDs. I also think we are pretty
much there, I, at least, didn’t miss it. (Although not knowing why my good old
desktop PC didn’t respond in 1998 because they decided to leave out the HDD
activity light would have been pretty horrible. But that was then :)

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jamesbritt
I've had laptops where the monitor would shut off to save power and having an
obvious way to know it is on is very valuable. I do not want to hit thepower
button if the machine is on.

In general, dedicated hardware indicators are handy when your screen may have
died or otherwise cannot rely on a monitor.

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briandoll
I've seen the documentary and agree that it's a great way to spend an hour or
so. What was disturbing though is exposed in the first minute of this video
clip. I'm forgetting his name, but the speaker is basically suggesting that
the only impactful company in the world actually doing design is Apple. It's
disheartening to hear, and in the years since the documentary that point seems
to be even more true.

Do you think we'll see a renaissance of design as a differentiator for
businesses, or is something so difficult to account for prior to product
launch doomed to be discarded by all but a few companies?

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blubb
It's Dieter Rams, and he's been a big inspiration to a lot of designers
(including Jonathan Ive). He actually said "only a few companies", and then
mentioned Apple.

There are other companies, but few in the computer / consumer electronics
business.

I think the key is that most companies treat design as an afterthought, or an
expense. It's completely irrelevant to most users, but look at most PC laptops
- they have a nice, glossy lid and front bezel. But the bottom cover seems
like a minefield of stickers, covers, fan openings and screws. There is no
design there. The design job ended with the obvious, visible parts.

Again, completely irrelevant to most users as they will never look at the
bottom cover. But it speaks a lot about how these companies think about design
- and why Apple is still the only company with a unibody laptop design.

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rauljara
Take away quote for me:

"So many of the products we're surrounded by, they want you to be very aware
of just how clever the solution was... [a solution should] speak to how you
are going to use it, not to the terrible struggles that we as designers and
engineers had."

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techsaucebaby
Well said. A lot of products I own make me feel this way, and its always
refreshing to use some so refined.

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chaosmachine
This is from a documentary called Objectified:

<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1241325/>

~~~
huhtenberg
^ Highly recommended, it's a really good way to spend an hour.

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lecha
It is amazing how many parallels there are between industrial design and
software design. In some way the two disciplines are indistinguishable.

Yet, the software industry culture tends to prefer designers with computer
science background/training, rather than "proper" design background.

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briguy
I agree, IVE talks about spending a lot of time designing "fixtures" to hold
parts during the various CNC operations. That is completely analogous to
spending time creating macros, scripts, development tools, etc. Essentially
creating tools that will help create tools.

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davidedicillo
Objectified is really great documentary, highly suggested to whoever "make"
stuff.

~~~
troystribling
The documentary Helvetica was made by the same director,
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica_%28film%29>. I was impressed that a
documentary about fonts could be so engaging.

~~~
mark_h
Yeah, I've loved both of them so far. I believe there's a third coming too,
although I don't know the topic.

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g0atbutt
One of my favorite designers. Interesting to hear him talking about creating
the tools to create the design.

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samratjp
The whole documentary and Apple's approach to design can be summed up in this
one sentence Ive makes: "..that's quite obsessive isn't it?"

