Why Wouldn’t It Be Any Other Way?
Jonathan Ive said in the documentary ‘Objectified’:
A lot of what we seem to be doing … is getting design out of the way. And I think when forms develop with that sort of reason and they’re not just arbitrary shapes it feels almost inevitable, it feels almost undesigned. It feels almost like ‘well of course it’s that way, you know, why wouldn’t it be any other way?’
This is what happens with Apple’s designs. Other companies can no longer see past them, they become the new ‘obvious solution’ for that product category. Then you get comments like this from HP President of Industrial Design Stacy Wolff in response to their obvious MacBook copycat products:
The thing is that you have to design what’s right, and that is that sometimes the wedge is the right solution, silver is the right solution. I see a lot of differences as much as the similarities. I think anybody that’s close enough to the business sees that there are differences in the design. Ours is rubber-coated at the bottom. We use magnesium; they didn’t do that — they use CNC aluminum. We did a brush pattern on our product; they didn’t. We did a different kind of keyboard execution. We did audio as a component; they didn’t. So there are a lot of things I can list off that are differences; but if you want to look at a macro level, there are a lot of similarities to everything in the market that’s an Ultrabook today. It is not because those guys did it first; it’s just that’s where the form factor is leading it.”
In other words “of course this is where we’d end up, why wouldn’t it be any other way?”.
m.guardian.co.uk
(via Instapaper)
