Jony Ive on Desert Island Discs

Lauren Laverne asks Jony Ive about some of his creative decisions when designing the original iMac on the Desert Island Discs podcast:

The purpose, the goal of having a handle was you may understand nothing about the nature of this object. Not understand its capability. But when you see a handle it references immediately and unamibigously your hand… you understand therefore something about this object. You make a connection to it. And so I think that the way the form was developed and the way that we developed the nature of the polymer… that it was slightly transulencet and that it was colorful. You talk about a color. Not gigahzertz or harddrive capacity. Suddently the language was way more accessible and egalitarian. But the product looked like it had just arrived or that it was going to go somewhere. It felt alive.

One of the reasons why I adore Apple is reflected in Ive’s philosophy when designing products. When I first started using Macs in the late 1980s the emphasis on accessibility and making connection was reflected in the aesthetics and interaction design of the operating system. The iMac’s introduction in 1997 expanded this approach to hardware design.

Emphasizing color and affordances like a handle seem obvious now after so many companies attempted to adopt a similar philosophy, but in the 1990s computer marketing was obsessed with processor speed since megahertz values consistently rose seemingly each month as new computers were released. Fast forward to today and the iMac’s tech specs page doesn’t even mention processor speed; just which M series SoC it comes with and a number of cores.

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