14 DAY TRIAL // In an exclusive interview with a fellow designer, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Industrial Design, Jonathan Ive, reveals that "A big part of the experience of a physical object has to do with the materials". Throughout the interview, Ive almost obsessively points out to the importance of understanding materials, being curious about their limits, and staying close to the workshop as much as possible.
"[At Apple] 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 tells Core77.
He weighs in on the three black reveals that interrupt the steel band wrapped around the phone, saying "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."
Core77 asked Ive to share some tips for young designers reading the interview. Apple’s head of design said that, "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."
Ive added that learning about materials academically is more difficult, and offers fewer results, than “by making things with it”. According to the genius behind Apple’s designs for the iPhone and iPod touch, “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." He concludes, saying "For a designer to continually learn about materials is not extracurricular, it's absolutely essential."