Lucas Raggers Nieuws 30 juni 2010, 22:40

Leestijd: 3 minuten

Jonathan Ive over het design van de iPhone

Core77.com had de eer om met Jonathan Ive te praten over het design van de iPhone 4 en het werk van een designer in het algemeen. In het interview lezen we dat Ive er alles aan gedaan heeft de antennes naadloos in elkaar over te laten gaan. We leren dat de juiste balans van materiaal, bewerking en vorm van essentieel belang zijn voor de beleving van een product. En we komen erachter dat een echte designer niet in de schoolbanken ontstaat.

Ive over materialen
“A big part of the experience of a physical object has to do with the materials, we experiment with and explore materials, processing them, learning about the inherent properties of the material–and the process of transforming it from raw material to finished product; for example, understanding exactly how the processes of machining it or grinding it affect it. That understanding, that preoccupation with the materials and processes, is very essential to the way we work.”

Ive over de antennes
“Those three black splits are co-molded in, and then the band goes through more processes. So it’s assembled first, the band, and then the final machining and grinding are performed, so the tolerances are extraordinary… Whatever people’s feelings are about the actual design of the product is of course subjective. But objectively I can say that the manufacturing tolerances are phenomenal. And we determined this, we designed it from the very beginning to meet those goals.”

Ive over de SIM houder
“The amount of care that went into that SIM tray is extraordinary. To achieve this kind of build quality is extraordinarily hard work and requires care across so many teams. It demands incredibly close collaboration with experts in certain areas, material sciences and so on.”

Ive over de beleving van een object
“The best design explicitly acknowledges that you cannot disconnect the form from the material; the material informs the form. It is the polar opposite of working virtually in CAD to create an arbitrary form that you then render as a particular material, annotating a part and saying ‘that’s wood’ and so on. Because when an object’s materials, the materials’ processes and the form are all perfectly aligned, that object has a very real resonance on lots of levels. People recognize that object as authentic and real in a very particular way.”

Ive over ontwerpscholen
“While design schools today may have sophisticated virtual design tools, the danger in relying on them too much is that we can end up isolated from the physical world. In our quest to quickly make three-dimensional objects, we can miss out on the experience of making something that helps give us our first understandings of form and material, of the way a material behaves, ‘I press too hard here, and it breaks here’ and so on. Some of the digital rendering tools are impressive, but it’s important that people still really try and figure out a way of gaining direct experience with the materials. It’s very hard to learn about materials academically, by reading about them or watching videos about them; the only way you truly understand a material is by making things with it. And it’s important to develop that appetite to want to make something, to be inquisitive about the material world, to want to truly understand a material on that level. For a designer to continually learn about materials is not extracurricular, it’s absolutely essential.”