The Object of Language and the Language of Objects

What happened when Stephen Fry, Bono and Jony Ive sat down to talk about design and technology at the Dalkey Book Festival in Dublin.

Note, this talk happened 24 hours before it was announced that Jony Ive would be leaving Apple in his role as Chief Design Officer.

It’s no surprise that, as a designer, I am a huge fan of Apple and the work of their design team, led by Jony Ive. Their relentless focus on craft and quality while connecting with the most essential human experiences to create products that transcend cultures and generations is something I continue to look up to.

Communicating the value and business case for a particular design direction can often be a source of frustration for design teams. While research, storytelling and business modelling of course help, we often fall short when trying to articulate the why on a certain decision. This is because there is often a strong emotional component that can be hard to quantify. Jony Ive said that “we make the most important decisions in the absence of hard metrics”.

For example, we might buy a particular house or decide to have a baby, not because we have run the data and determined it is the optimum decision, but because it feels right. This is why it is critical to have buy-in at a leadership level on some of the less quantifiable aspects of products and services.

Core to Apple’s philosophy is the idea that the act of designing is an expression of gratitude to the end-user. This is reflected in the care and attention to detail that they apply to products big and small. When you engage with any product, you are having a conversation with the people who conceived it. If you don’t feel respected as a user, design has an uphill battle to win over support and long term interest. When asked if there are any products that irritate him, Jony Ive’s response was telling: “It’s not the objects that annoy me, but the people responsible for them that annoy me”.

This idea, according to Stephen Fry, has far-reaching implications. He said that “beauty is a guide to morality. The depth of vulgarity means something morally. The aesthetics are not the icing on the cake, they are the cake. Apple always understood this — the style is the substance”.

You could argue of course that the very high price tag on Apple products is a barrier and that they are not expressing gratitude to the people who can’t afford to buy their products, but that’s for another day.

When asked to describe his role at Apple, Jony Ive said he considers himself a toolmaker first and foremost. It’s an interesting description, one that doesn’t necessarily suggest the level of polish found on Apple products (sometimes quite literally!). Digging down a bit further however, you can see that it is a very illustrative description of his approach and philosophy. He sees Apple products as “powerful tools that enable you to do things you couldn’t do without them”.

Successful products solve problems. By framing products as tools, we can strip their function right back to only the essential elements — to focus only on the most important problems and unmet needs we may have. This is in many ways the essence of how Apple approaches the design of their products and services.

Another aspect to this is that tools can have multiple functions — either explicitly designed or uncovered through improvisation. Apple seeks to provide users with enough flexibility to empower them to determine the appropriate application. Jony Ive stated that Apple products “can assume a gravity and significance that is extraordinary. [The function] is often only a pointer of what you are going do with it”. The often sparse and minimal presentation of their products leaves room for interpretation.

Apple is of course known for its simple aesthetic, whether it is in the design of their stores, products or user interfaces — they rarely add more than is absolutely necessary. Jony Ive noted how this approach can often be misinterpreted as a stylistic decision, “There’s a danger that you could interpret what we do, at a very superficial level visually, as being minimal, and that’s a stylistic decision”.

Simple is, of course, very hard to do. Steve Jobs once put it very succinctly, “It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying ‘no’ to 1,000 things”. The popular perception of design is that of generating ideas, creating new concepts and willing them to life. The reality is that our role is much closer to that of an editor. We focus first on identifying the core problem to be solved and when translating this insight into a product or service, we try to strip away the noise so that only the core idea shines through.

Expanding on Apple’s approach to design, Jony Ive noted how it can be “tempting, as designers, to express how we solved the problem. It’s far more important to remember that solving difficult problems is our job. Our goal is to create space for people”.

This idea of design as a tool to create space for users was a central idea in this talk and very relevant today, in the context of a world where technology is creating more and more noise in our lives. This idea of leaving space for users to fill in the gaps is more important than ever. Ultimately “the tools [we design] are means to a much bigger and more important end”, according to Ive.

This leads on to another core theme of this talk. In a world where fake news, trust and privacy issues are at the centre of our news cycles, Apple is caught up in a Silicon Valley hurricane that is on the verge of spiralling out of control. As Stephen Fry put it, when looking back at mythology to understand lessons for today, “The lid is well and truly off Pandora’s box”.

Bono probed for Jony Ive for his perspective: “Apple is in politics now, as the largest company in the world — how does that make you feel?”. Ive’s response gave some insight into how Apple is responding to the crisis. He said that “there is a danger, by definition, if you are going to do something new. There are consequences that are planned, intended and hoped for, then there are a whole range of consequences that you didn’t expect”.

He acknowledged that Apple is part of the problem: “We feel responsible — it doesn’t mean we had an intention to create some of these consequences. We were surprised, but you can’t just walk away”.

He was quick to point out however that Silicon Valley is a vast collection of different companies with a diverse range of viewpoints on this issue. In a thinly veiled criticism of Apple’s competitors, he added that “some business models need the extensive and frequent use of your screen. I would argue that this is fundamentally irresponsible”.

This does raise the issue however of how Apple qualifies what they determine to be “correct” — which he did not elaborate on in this talk. He did say that “if you are utterly consumed with wanting to make something that expresses your gratitude and thanks, and you do it well, the consequences may not be immediate but they can be surprising, profound and significant”.

This talk raised several interesting points that would have been worthy of a prolonged discussion in themselves. There is little doubt that Jony Ive, and by association Apple, have noble intentions in their approach to designing their products. I do question however, in their position as one of the wealthiest and most influential companies in the world, whether their position as ‘neutral toolmakers’ is valid.

On this point, Stephen Fry claimed that “tools have no moral valency, it’s all in our hands… An axe can cut down a tree and warm a family or it can attack someone. Same is true of an iPhone or computer. They can create a thing of beauty and connect people or they can destroy, bully, coerce and monstrously deceive”.

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