Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products (17 page)

When Steve came in, he wanted the conversation to be between him and the person he was talking to. . . . [W]e would turn the music up so that his voice would carry directly to one person only. You really couldn’t hear what he was saying.

—DOUG SATZGER

On February 9, 2001, after the hubbub of Macworld Expo had died down, the industrial design studio moved from the building on Valley Green Drive (across the road from Apple’s main campus) to a large space inside Apple’s HQ, where it remains today. The new design studio was put on the ground floor of Infinite Loop 2, known internally at Apple as IL2.

The move was, in part, symbolic. Bob Brunner had set up the original studio across the street to give it some independence from the rest of the company. Now ID would inhabit space at the heart of Apple, allowing Jobs to work more closely with Jony and his team. It affirmed for all to see the elevated status of design within the company. In Jony’s words, ID was now truly “close to the heartbeat of the company.”
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The move was a big one logistically, too, since the studio had become home to big machinery and prototyping equipment. The new quarters were carefully crafted for Jony’s designers, with every piece of furniture—the tables, the chairs and even the glass—made to order.

A large space, the studio occupies most of the ground floor of IL2. Security is extremely tight, and a wall of large frosted windows across the bottom of the building prevents anyone from getting a peek inside.

Inside, the studio is divided into several different spaces. To the left of the entrance is a well-equipped kitchen with a large table where Jony’s team conducts their biweekly brainstorming sessions. To the right of the studio’s front entrance is a small, rarely used conference room.

Opposite the front entrance is Jony’s office. A glass cube measuring about twelve feet by twelve feet, it’s the only private office in the studio. The front wall and door are made of glass with stainless steel fittings, just like the ones in Apple’s stores. Except for a small shelf system, Jony’s office is bare with plain white walls, featuring no pictures of his family or design awards, just a desk, chair and lamp.

His leather chair is a Supporto chair from the UK office furniture manufacturer Hille. Designed in 1979 by the award-winning designer Fred Scott, the leather and aluminum chair is recognized as a design masterpiece. Jony himself cited it as one of his favorite designs (“the Supporto is a wonderful chair,” Jony told
ICON
magazine),
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and he selected it for the new Industrial Design Centre in Cupertino, California, and for his designers, all of whom sit at Supporto desks with leather chairs.

Jony’s desk was custom-made by London-based designer Marc Newsom, one of his best friends. The desk is usually bare except for his seventeen-inch MacBook and several colored pencils used for drawing, which are typically arranged neatly on his desk. He doesn’t use an external monitor or other peripheral equipment.

Directly outside Jony’s office are four large wooden project tables that are used to present prototype products to executives. This was where Steve Jobs gravitated when he visited the studio. In fact, the studio setup gave Jobs the idea for the big open tables in the Apple stores. Each table
is dedicated to a different project—one for MacBooks, another for the iPad, the iPhone and so on. They are used to display models and prototypes of whatever Jony has to show Jobs and other executives. The models are covered at all times with black cloth.

Next to Jony’s office and the presentation tables is a large CAD room, also fronted by a glass wall. The CAD room is home to about fifteen CAD operators (“surface guys”). If the designers want to see what a CAD model looks like as a real object, they’ll send the file to a CNC milling machine in the machine shop next door.

The machine room, aka “the shop,” is at the far end of the space. The shop is divided internally into three rooms by more glass walls. At the front are three big CNC machines. These big hulking milling machines are capable of crafting anything from metal to RenShape. They have covers that contain scrap materials, making them “clean” machines. Behind them are the “dirty” machines, namely, various cutting and drilling machines that can create a mess. The so-called dirty shop is sealed behind glass. Next to it, on the right, is a finishing room with fine-sanding machines and a big paint-spraying booth about the size of a car.

The shop is used by the design team to make models of upcoming products to quickly validate ideas. “They’d get a CAD file for surfacing; they would create a tool path based on the surfaces, do all the setups and run a part,” said Satzger. As well as modeling the basic shape of a product, the team will make models of details: the corner of a product or its buttons, for example. Often, Jony’s team makes hundreds of models, just like Jony did in college. As the product development process progresses, the design team will outsource model making to an outside specialist firm.

Jony’s office, the presentation tables, the CAD room and shop are all to the right of the front entrance. On the other side, an opening near
Jony’s office leads to the area where the designers work. In the large open space, lined by the long wall of frosted windows, the designers work at five large tables, subdivided by low dividers. The space is messy and chaotic, with boxes, parts, samples, bikes and toys everywhere. The atmosphere feels light, fun. “Someone might be skateboarding in there, doing jumps, or Bart Andre and Chris Stringer kicking a soccer ball,” said Satzger.

Music is an important part of the design studio’s atmosphere. There are about twenty white speakers in the room, with a pair of thirty-six-inch-high concert subwoofers. “When you walked into this concrete and steel, highly reflective room, the sound was immediately deep and loud,” Satzger remembered. “All kinds of music from around the world is played. It’s really lively. We had so much music on that thing, you could pick anything.”

Jony is a big fan of techno—music that drove Jony’s boss, Jon Rubinstein, to distraction. “They played loud techno-pop in the design studio,” he said. “I like quiet so that I can focus and think properly. But the ID guys liked it.”

“The energy of that room, the noise of the room made me work a lot better,” said Satzger. “I hated sitting back in my little space. . . . [F]or me, the louder the noise the better.”

Steve Jobs liked the music too, and often turned up the music when he visited, but for more than its sonic pleasures. “When Steve came in, he wanted the conversation to be between him and the person he was talking to,” said Satzger. “In all these open spaces, if it’s quiet, it’s really easy to hear what people are talking about. When he came in, we would turn the music up so that his voice would carry directly to one person only. You really couldn’t hear what he was saying.”

The studio seemed to have a visible effect on the intense Jobs. “Steve in the ID space was a different person. He was a lot more relaxed and
interactive,” Satzger said. “Steve had moods all the time. There were always things that were changing in how he approached people. But when he came in the ID space, he was always really comfortable.”

Jobs spent a lot of time in the studio, but when he was away, Jony used his absence as an opportunity to get work done for the absent master. “When he went away, we would do 150 to 200 percent more work,” Satzger explained. “It was a good chance to blast stuff out and put new work, new ideas in front of him when he came back.”

Jobs significantly beefed up security when the design studio moved onto the main campus. Because the studio is Apple’s ideas factory, Jobs wanted no leaks. He knew security was sometimes lax on Valley Green, and that visitors were occasionally buzzed in by whoever was around. Jobs was determined that wouldn’t be the case in the new location.

The vast majority of Apple’s employees are barred from the company’s design lab. Even some members of the executive team are forbidden from entering the studio. Scott Forstall, for example, who rose to be head of iOS software, wasn’t allowed to visit. His badge wouldn’t even open the door.

Few outsiders have been inside the studio. Jobs would occasionally bring in his wife. Walter Isaacson was given a tour, but he described only the presentation tables in his biography of Jobs. The only known photograph of the studio was published in
Time
magazine in October 2005.
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The photo shows Jobs, Jony and three executives at the studio’s wooden project tables, the shop in the background.

There’s also some subtle subterfuge in the media with the ID studio. Jony occasionally gives interviews on Apple’s campus in an engineering
workshop full of CNC milling machines. It’s been identified as the design studio, but it’s actually an engineering workshop nearby.

The secrecy extends well beyond physically protecting the products within Apple’s own studios. When working on new products, the software engineers have no idea what the hardware looks like and, conversely, the engineers have no idea how the software works. When Jony’s team was making prototypes for the iPhone, the designers worked with a picture of the home screen with dummy icons.

Although all departments have their proprietary information, the secrecy is evidently tilted more in one direction. Apple’s most secretive department is Jony’s group. “It’s locked down,” said Satzger. “People know not to talk about their work and what was going on inside Apple to the wrong people.” Who are the “wrong people”? Essentially anyone but direct colleagues. Even Jony is forbidden from telling his wife what he’s working on.

A former Apple engineer who worked closely with Jony’s group in the product design team said the secrecy could get exhausting. “Out of everything I’ve ever done in my life, I’ve never seen a more secret environment than working there,” he said. “We were constantly under threat of losing our jobs for revealing any shred of anything. And even within Apple, your neighbors often didn’t know what you were working on. . . . The secrecy was like a gun to your head. Make one false move and we’ll pull this trigger.”
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Apple’s obsessive secrecy has also meant that the designers have gotten almost no press and very little public recognition. They’ve won almost every award and are certainly admired in design circles, but to the general public, they remain largely anonymous. There’s surprisingly little resentment about the lack of credit. The team is used to it and Jony is gracious in sharing the recognition their products do receive. Though he typically gets the awards, he always talks about the team. As one
observer wryly noted, the only time Jony says “I” is when he’s talking about the iPhone or iPad. The move is as much to shield the individuals on the team, however, as it is to give due praise. According to Rubinstein, “Although in the press Jony gets all the credit, in reality his whole team does a lot of work. . . . They all contribute tremendously with great ideas.”
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The design team doesn’t take offense at the lack of individual public praise. “We took it as, we’re all getting credit,” said Satzger. “[Apple] always says, ‘the Apple design team,’ but Steve never wanted us to be in front of the camera. They blocked headhunters and search people. Because we were blocked from facing media and hidden from headhunters and so on, we called ourselves the ‘ID Team that’s Behind the Iron Curtain.’”
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As the principal inventors at Apple, Jony and his group conceive and create new products, refine existing ones and do some fundamental R&D, though they are not the only R&D group in the company (there is no distinct R&D department). The sixteen-odd designers focus on refining and improving Apple’s products and manufacturing processes. By comparison, Samsung has a thousand designers working in thirty-four research centers around the world. Of course, Samsung makes many more products than Apple (including some components for the iPhone and iPad).

Stringer describes the role of an industrial designer at Apple as “to imagine objects that don’t exist and to guide the process that brings them to life. And so that includes defining the experience that a customer has when they touch and feel our products. It’s managing the overall form and the materials, the textures, the colors. And it’s also working with engineering groups to, as I say, bring it to life, to bring it to the market and to building the craftsmanship that it absolutely needs to have to have that Apple quality.”
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Jony’s ID group has become a tightly knit team, as many of them have worked together for decades. They no longer design Apple’s products alone, but each product has a designated design lead, the designer who does most of the actual work, plus one or two deputies.

Weekly meetings ensure the design process is collaborative. Two or three times a week, Jony’s entire team gathers around the kitchen table for brainstorming sessions. All of the designers must be present. No exceptions. The sessions typically last for three hours, starting at nine or ten a.m.

The brainstorms begin with coffee. A couple of the designers play barista, making coffee for the group from a high-end espresso maker in the kitchen. Daniele De Iuliis, the Italian from the United Kingdom, is regarded as the coffee guru. “Danny D was the person who educated us all on coffee and grind and the color of the crema, how to properly do the milk, how temperature is important and all that stuff,” said Satzger, who was one of his keenest disciples.

When it’s time to get down to it, the brainstorms are freewheeling, creative roundtables where everyone is expected to contribute. Jony runs the brainstorms, but he doesn’t dominate them.

“Jony’s always been involved in every design session,” said one designer.

The brainstorms are very focused. Sometimes it’s a model presentation, sometimes the detail of a button or speaker grille is discussed, or the group hashes out whatever design problem Jony’s group is working on.

“[We] discuss our objectives, and so we can just be talking about what we would want a product to be,” said Stringer. “That ordinarily becomes sketching, so we’ll sit there with our sketch books and sketch and trade ideas and go back and forth. That’s where the very hard,
brutal, honest criticism comes in and we thrash through ideas until we really feel like we’re getting something that’s worth modeling.”
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Sketching is fundamental to their workflow. “I end up sketching everywhere,” said Stringer. “I’ll sketch on loose-leaf paper. I’ll sketch on models. I’ll sketch on anything I can put my hands on, quite often on top of CAD outputs for want of better things to do.” Stringer likes CAD printouts, he’s said, because they already have the shape of the product. “You’re working with something that already has the perspective set up and the views in a way that you can sort of add in lavish detail upon them,” he said.
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Jony is also an inveterate sketcher. He is a good at it, but emphasizes speed over detail. “He always wanted to get a thought down on paper so that people could understand it really quickly,” said Satzger. “Jony’s drawings were really sketchy, with a shaky hand. His drawing style was really interesting.”

Jony’s sketchbooks are “really cool,” remembered Satzger, but he regards the artists of the group as Richard Howarth, Matt Rohrbach and Chris Stringer. “Richard Howarth would come in saying he had a crap idea and ‘you guys are going to hate it’ but then shared these amazing sketches.”

When the group was designing the iMac, the table was covered with loose sheets of copy paper for sketching on, but Jony’s group moved on to use sketchbooks, often hardbound volumes from Cachet by Daler-Rowney, a small British company. The studio’s office supply stockroom is stacked with them. With bindings made of high-quality canvas, they don’t fall to pieces. Howarth and Jony chose blue sketchbooks about three times as thick as the Cachet sketchbooks, with ribbon markers.

The sketchbooks make it easy to go back and look at earlier ideas, which is vital, as the group’s practice is to document everything
generated during a brainstorm. These sketchbooks would later became a contentious issue at the
Apple v. Samsung
trial.

A lot of sketching happens in these weekly sessions. At the end of the brainstorm, Jony will sometimes instruct everyone around the table to copy their sketchbooks and give the pages to the lead designer on the project under discussion; Jony will later sit with the lead designer and carefully go through all the pages. The lead and his two deputies will also pore through the pages trying to find ways to integrate new ideas.

“Some days I’d be engaged and have ten pages of stuff,” Satzger remembered. “Sometimes you could feel when a designer wasn’t engaged in the material, when they weren’t filling up pages of things.”