This article was taken from the September 2011 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
For a man who has done more than almost any other industrial designer to change our relationship with technology, Sir Jonathan Ive is remarkably unassuming. Softly spoken and eloquent, Jony (as he is known to his friends) has shaped every curve, switch and icon on Apple products from the candy-coloured iMac introduced in 1998 to the iPad 3 with its retina display.
In the last twelve months, Apple has become the world's most valuable company -- it currently has a market capitalisation of £350bn -- because of its ability to create entirely new categories of devices and entire ecosystems based around them. Ive is a man with a deep understanding of the products he creates -- from the formula of the glass used in the iPad's screen to the layout of the box it arrives in.
His obsession with detail is legendary, as are the sources of his inspiration: a confectionary maker helped get the colour of the first iMac just right; a Japanese sword-maker taught Ive about the properties of metals for use in laptop bodies. Ive also helped transform public perception of his field: many in the design world believe he has changed the face of their profession.
Ive has become a household name, receiving a knighthood for services to the design industry is the last New Year's Honours, which he describes as "humbling". "The work that Ive has done with Apple is the most powerful demonstration that there is nothing fluffy or cosmetic about design," says Deyan Sudjic, director of London's Design Museum. "It is what created the world's most valuable company."
Sudjic believes it is hard to overestimate the broader impact of Ive's work on society. "He has made his reputation not with chairs or lemon squeezers but with the electronics that have reshaped the way that most of the world works, communicates, navigates, takes pictures and listens to music," he says. "What makes him stand out in a profession not known for its shrinking violets is his modesty and his intensity.
His work speaks for itself. He doesn't need to sell it, and he has shown us that design means <span class="s2">something -- at a time when it risked being trivialised by too much designer tat."
Ive, 45, has kept his strong British accent despite having moved to San Francisco in 1992. Shaven-headed and obviously no stranger to the gym, Ive is typically impeccably dressed, and speaks in a way that suggests every sentence and every word has been carefully thought through. Colleagues talk of his incredible enthusiasm for work, his face lighting up when he talks about it, and he can't help but grin infectiously when explaining a feature or solution to a problem he is particularly pleased with.
Born in February 1967 in Chigwell, he attended the same school as David Beckham (although several years apart). Ive says he inherited a love of making things from his father, a silversmith, and his fascination with the detail of design began early. "As a kid, I remember taking apart whatever I could get my hands on," he told the Design Museum in a rare interview in 2003, after he was named its inaugural Designer of the Year. "I knew that I wanted to design but I had no idea what -- I was interested in everything: cars, products, furniture, jewellery, boats."
Ive attended Newcastle Polytechnic -- now Northumbria University -- where he studied industrial design. This was also where he first came across the Mac. He says his first impressions on seeing the device were of feeling a connection with its designers: "There was a real
sense of the people who made it."
After a brief stint as a commercial designer, Ive founded a design agency called Tangerine with three friends. "Jony is a very unique individual as well as a very gifted designer," says Clive Grinyer, who set up Tangerine with Ive, and is now director of customer experience at Cisco's Internet Business Solutions Group. "He remains the most honest, dedicated, unaffected by fame and likeable person -- let alone designer -- you could meet."
Grinyer says that right from the start of his career, Ive expressed an intense dislike of the technical specs relied on by many of Apple's competitors to sell products. "Jonathan always hated techno-gabble, the macho shouting of features and performance that meant nothing to real people. He thinks with great clarity about what is really important to people, functionally and emotionally, and that is what he shared with Steve Jobs. Like every designer, he wants to shape the world and help it be sensible and useful to everyone -- only he really did it."
Grinyer also offers a rare insight into what working with Ive is like, describing him as "a great leader -- an inspirer".
It was while working at Tangerine that Ive first came into contact with Apple -- which then poached him. It's something Grinyer still laments. "We all regret that he had to leave the company we started together in Shoreditch, [which we] fought to make successful in the unfriendly
climate of a 90s UK industry that did not appreciate or sustain his talent. California has provided the culture, climate and stage for his dedication to designing the best products he and his colleagues can possibly create."
However, after he joined Apple, Ive was effectively sidelined until the return of Steve Jobs to the firm in 1996. His relationship with Jobs is considered the key to his success -- Jobs described Ive as his "spiritual partner" in Walter Isaacson's recent biography of the Apple cofounder.
Jobs and Ive forged their relationship over the iMac, which marked Ive's arrival as a world-beating designer capable of creating devices with mass appeal.
After the iMac, Ive's instantly recognisable work continued with the iPod, iPhone and iPad -- each one radically changing the way we interact with technology. His team is small and interdisciplinary -- it includes silicon designers and electronic and mechanical engineers. "You would struggle to determine who does what when we get together," he says. "Our goals are very simple -- to design and make better products," he says. "If we can't make something that is better, we won't do it." Models are key to the design process, and he admits that only when his team come to create the first models of a new product does it begin to come alive. "When you make a 3D model, however crude, you bring form to a nebulous idea, and everything changes -- the entire process shifts," he recently explained. Although his workspace is completely off limits to virtually all on the Apple campus, Ive has described it as a "large open studio and massive sound system." One of Ive's friends, DJ Jon Digweed, will sometimes provide the soundtrack the team work to.
Ive lives in a relatively modest house in San Francisco with his wife, Heather Pegg, who he met at secondary school in London, and their twin sons. He commutes to Apple's headquarters in Cupertino every day. Rarely interviewed or photographed in public, Ive's public image has been carefully controlled -- but this may be changing.
Carolina Milanesi, research VP at analysts Gartner, has monitored Apple for several years and has noticed Ive gradually emerge from the shadows. "He has been working for Apple for such a long time, and really is seen as the man behind the products," she says. "He is far and away the most influential designer working today, but since Steve Jobs stood down and then passed away, his profile has really stepped up -- people really look to him, he seems to be playing a very different role now."
Jobs and Ive were a common sight on Apple's vast Cupertino campus, often having lunch together at Caffe Mac, its on-site restaurant. At a celebration of Jobs's life held just yards away from their lunch spot, Ive made a rare public speech about his friend, saying: "Just as Steve loved ideas and loved making stuff, he treated the process of creativity with a rare and a wonderful reverence."
At the memorial event for Steve Jobs on campus, he really came across as more of a front person for Apple, underlining how close he was to Jobs," Milanesi says. "I think he is more important within the company now. I think of him as being on a par with Tim Cook in the way decisions are made. He's a down-to-earth guy, which is rare for a designer, and it makes him very accessible to people."
As Apple's new CEO Tim Cook likes to say (frequently), there is more to come from Ive and his team. Besides the impending iPhone 5, Ive's lab also holds the secrets of Apple's plans to dominate the living room, with rumours of a big-screen TV. He also has another, very different project on the horizon -- Apple's new "spaceship" campus in Cupertino, on which he has said he is "working very closely" with Sir Norman Foster. It is likely to be a lasting legacy to Steve Jobs -- as well as giving Ive the opportunity to have an even bigger stereo-system installed in his lab.
For all these qualities and for his outstanding achievements in 2012, our panel deemed Jony Ive the most influential individual in Britain's extended digital economy.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
