Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products (4 page)

After his placement at RWG, Jony returned north. He resumed studying for his degree but, later that year, he won a prestigious travel bursary (grant) from the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, better known as the Royal Society of Arts or RSA.
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Established in 1754 in a Covent Garden coffee shop, the RSA is an ancient British charity, one of Britain’s oldest and finest institutions for the promotion of social change.
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The highly competitive bursaries attract entries from hundreds of students all over the country and each bears the sponsorship of a particular company. The RSA grants are, in effect, a recruiting tool, a means for corporations to find hot student designers. The first year Jony entered the Office and Domestic Equipment bursary challenge, the sponsor was Sony.

His winning entry was one of his major college projects, a futuristic concept for a telephone. The phone was a blue-sky project, an exercise in futuristic design, assigned to get the students engaged in What if? thinking. Newcastle put a heavy emphasis on emerging technology at the time, with technologies like the Sony Walkman altering existing modes of listening to music. Though those early devices look primitive today, such portable technology was beginning to become part of everyone’s lives. Every student had to have a Walkman.
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Students at Newcastle Polytechnic understood their careers would be defined by technology. “We were the guys who were told we had the job of bringing it into the mainstream,” said Jony’s fellow student Craig Mounsey. “This really was a core part of the course culture . . . [This is] why the course was so successful. We were encouraged to adopt and explore any emerging technology and integrate it into our designs. Further we were encouraged to speculate about future technology directions and their implications.”

In responding to the challenge, Jony designed a phone that was an innovative take on landline devices. This was years before the mobile phone became ubiquitous, and his winning design was for an innovative landline phone. Characteristically, it managed to rethink the standard image of what a phone was expected to look like. At the time, phones
had a receiver with a headset attached by a coiled wire, but Jony’s resembled a stylized white question mark.

He called it, somewhat pretentiously, The Orator. The all-in-white phone was made from a one-inch-diameter plastic tube. The base contained the mouthpiece; the user was to hold the phone by the stalk or leg of the question mark; the curve of the question rose to the earpiece speaker.
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The design may not have been very practical, but it was great design. It won Jony a travel award worth £500, which, for the moment, he put aside. As for the phone, set designers for a Jackie Chan sci-fi movie got wind of it and asked to use it as a prop. Jony declined because he thought his prototype was too delicate for use on a movie set.
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The RSA hadn’t seen the last of Jony. A year later, he teamed up with his friend David Tonge to enter another student bursary challenge. This time, the business services manufacturer Pitney Bowes was the main sponsor of the competition, and the winner would visit the company’s headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut.

In their last year at college, Jony and Tonge each had to complete a major project, largely self-driven, and a dissertation as a requirement for the Design for Industry course. Tonge was designing aluminum office chairs, while Jony was working on a hearing aid–microphone combination for use by hard-of-hearing students in a classroom.
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The hearing aid would eventually be exhibited at the Young Designers Centre Exhibition 1989 at the Design Centre in Haymarket, London, but for the competition, the two soon-to-be graduates were determined to win and so devised another product altogether.
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“We felt we could use both our skills to frankly speaking—win,” said Tonge. “At that time I was building two fully working aluminum prototype office chairs for my final project and Jonathan was doing his hearing aids. I guess we felt a large object was somewhere in between these two and our joint skills. And we were ambitious.”

Jony and Tonge were strategic about entering the RSA travel competition. They reviewed the different project briefs, effectively request-for-proposal descriptions that specified possible entries, before choosing to design an “intelligent ATM.” The futuristic ATM promised to be both an interesting challenge and a good fit for their combined skills.

They figured out how to work together to come up with something winning, aesthetically pleasing and useful. Tonge was delighted with the potential collaboration. “It was a scale of product Jonathan enjoyed, could control and excelled at,” said Tonge. “The level of finish was what was always amazing about his work relative to others. Others were and are capable of the conceptual thought and creativity but very few capable of that level of finish. . . . [I]t’s still the standout component of his work.”

Jony and Tonge combined labors to create a flatscreen ATM machine: clean, unadorned and, in the Jony Ive way, made of white plastic. It won the Pitney Bowes’ Walter Wheeler Attachment Award, which included a much larger prize than the previous bursary: £1,500.

Years later, Tonge, who went on to have a successful design career at IDEO and now runs his London design studio, The Division, is still proud of their project and the effort they invested. “We did consider the relationship of the piece [the ATM] to users, disability and the space it was living in. It was a very polished piece of work that—without being arrogant—was visually and in detail way ahead of what most students and many professional designers were doing at the time. Hence, I think the judges were just bowled over.”

Jony, too, took great pride in his undergraduate work. For his final-year presentation at university, he refined the telephone he’d submitted for the bursary and, when he was ready for his final-year presentation, he invited his friend from RWG, Clive Grinyer, to come up and see it. Grinyer made the five-hour drive from London to Jony’s tiny apartment
in the tough Gateshead section of Newcastle. When he arrived, Grinyer was amazed to find the apartment filled with more than a hundred foam model prototypes of Jony’s project, his design discipline on display. When most students might build half a dozen models, Jony had built a hundred.
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“I’d never seen anything like it: the sheer focus to get it perfect,” recalled Grinyer.

Grinyer said the differences from one model to the next were subtle, but the step-by-step evolution betrayed Jony’s drive to thoroughly explore his ideas and get it right. Building scores of models and prototypes would become another trademark in his career at Apple. “It was incredible that he had made so many and that each one was subtly different,” Grinyer said. “I imagine Charles Darwin would have connected with them. It was like watching a piece of evolution really. Jonathan’s desire for perfection meant that every single model had a tiny change and the only way he could understand if it was the right change or not was to make a physical model of it.”
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Jony also invited his sponsor from RWG, Phil Gray, who also vividly remembered the polished final model of the phone. “It was an exquisite piece of design—very cleverly conceived,” said Gray. “It was very logical, beautifully thought out. The model was fantastic. Remember, at that time there were no mobile phones. There was no iconic telephone. Telephones were basically a box on the table with a dial or a keypad and a handset over it. So Jony’s design was very radical. And very well presented, in terms of its logic and ergonomics—as well as being eminently simplistic.”

The professors at Newcastle Polytechnic shared the admiration for the work: Jony’s degree exhibition earned him a first, the UK’s highest degree distinction.

He gained the respect of admiration of professionals in the field,
earning the status of a respected peer at barely twenty years of age. “His exhibition was extraordinary,” said Gray.

Jony had also been the first undergraduate student to win two travel bursaries from the RSA. In retrospect, RSA archivist Melanie Andrews, who has helped administer the RSA awards for decades, made a telling point about an early sign of the prodigal Jony’s abilities. “In both these projects,” Andrews observed, “he displayed an interest in both the hardware and software design of each, which has been the winning formula for Apple products.”
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Two life-defining relationships were firmly established during Jony’s college days. The first, made official in August 1987, was his marriage as a second-year student to childhood sweetheart Heather Pegg. Also the child of a local schools inspector, she had been one year below Jony at Walton though the couple met at Wildwood Christian Fellowship. They married in Stafford and would later have twin boys: Charlie and Harry.

Around the same time, Jony discovered another strong love: Apple.

Throughout his school years, he demonstrated no affinity whatsoever for computers. Convinced he was technically inept, he felt frustrated because computers were clearly becoming useful tools in many aspects of life, a trend that seemed likely to gain momentum. Then, toward the end of his time at college, Jony met the Mac.

From the first, Jony was astounded at how much easier to use the Mac was than anything else he had tried. The care the machine’s designers took to shape the whole user experience struck him; he felt an immediate connection to the machine and, more important, to the soul of the enterprise. It was the first time he felt the humanity of a product. “I
t was
such a dramatic moment and I remember it so clearly,” he said. “There was a real sense of the people who made it.”
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“I started to learn more about Apple, how it had been founded, its values and its structure,” Jony later said. “The more I learned about this cheeky, almost rebellious company, the more it appealed to me, as it unapologetically pointed to an alternative in a complacent and creatively bankrupt industry. Apple stood for something and had a reason for being that wasn’t just about making money.”
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Jony was interested in getting things right and fit for purpose. He was completely interested in humanizing technology.

—PETER PHILLIPS

Summer 1989 saw the departure of Jony Ive, together with David Tonge, for America. Freshly graduated from Newcastle Polytechnic, their RSA prize money in their pockets, the two were booked to spend eight weeks at Pitney Bowes in Connecticut.

If Jony expected to be impressed by what he saw at the company’s headquarters in Stamford, about forty miles northeast of Manhattan, he was disappointed. “He did not find it very interesting,” Grinyer remembered with a laugh. Jony was much more excited about traveling to San Francisco and touring some of the up-and-coming design studios in the Bay Area.

When their stint at Pitney Bowes was finished, Jony and Tonge split up. Tonge traveled to the offices of Herman Miller, Knoll and a few other firms in the office furniture business, and Jony hopped a flight to California to make the rounds in Silicon Valley. He hired a car in San Francisco and drove down the Peninsula to visit a couple of studios, at one point going to ID Two (now IDEO), where Grinyer had worked, and then Lunar Design in downtown San Jose, which was run by Robert Brunner, a fast-rising design star. He and Brunner established an almost immediate connection.

Brunner was born in 1958 and grew up in San Jose in Silicon Valley,
the child of a mechanical engineer father and artist mother. His father, Russ, a longtime IBM-er, invented much of the guts of the first hard drive.
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Until he reached college, Brunner had no idea there was such a thing as product design. He was on his way to join the art department at San Jose State University when he fortuitously passed a display of models and renderings by the design department.

“I decided there and then that’s what I wanted to do,” he recalled happily.

While pursuing a degree in ID at San Jose State, he interned at what was then the biggest and fastest-growing design agency in Silicon Valley, GVO Inc. After graduating, in 1981, Brunner joined the firm but grew unhappy, feeling the company had little ambition or vision.

“There was no editorial style at GVO,” he said. “They just wanted you to crank out the renderings and keep the clients happy.”
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In 1984, he tried another tack, teaming up with a couple of other GVO employees, Jeff Smith and Gerard Furbershaw, and another designer, Peter Lowe. The four pooled their money—about $5,000—and leased space in a former helicopter factory. They rented a photocopier and shared a single Apple IIc computer. They named their new firm Lunar Design, a moniker Brunner had been using for his moonlighting work while at GVO.

The timing was perfect. In the mid-eighties, Silicon Valley was just starting to get into consumer products, resulting in a high demand for design agencies like Lunar. GVO also came to the game with a difference—most of the firms in the Valley were run by engineers who had little expertise in design.

“It wasn’t like we had a crystal ball or anything,” said Brunner, “but it turned out we had very good timing. It was at the launch of the golden age of Silicon Valley. We got started when Frog came over, and ID2 and Matrix came over, and David Kelley, which became IDEO. All that was
happening when we started out. It was an amazing time to be working and starting your business in Silicon Valley.”
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By 1989, Lunar boasted a prestigious roster of clients and was flying high. The clients included Apple, which had Brunner working on several special projects, including an attempt to design a successor to Steve Jobs’s original Macintosh, now dated after four years on the market without major changes. (The project, code-named Jaguar, eventually morphed into the PowerPC platform).

When Jony came to visit Brunner, he showed him the tubular phone concept he’d built for his final-year project at Newcastle.

The model wasn’t just a mock-up of the phone’s shape, like most student projects. It also included all the internal components, and Jony had even worked out how it would be manufactured. “I was really impressed by it,” Brunner said. “The design was definitely pushing things a bit in terms of being a usable device,” said Brunner. “But what really blew me away was when he disassembled the models . . . [with] all the components inside. I’d never seen a student take a beautiful piece of work and then have it fully figured out. That was pretty incredible.” Jony had even worked out the thickness of the parts and how they would be manufactured in an injection molder.

Brunner said that not only were Jony’s designs the best he’d seen from a student but that they also rivaled some of the best design work being produced in Silicon Valley at the time. “It was amazing for someone just out of school, so young and who had not had a job yet, to [show] not just the natural ability but the interest in how things worked,” said Brunner. “Most students coming out of school are primarily interested in form and image and there’s a few that are interested in how things work, but very few that come up with something provocative and amazing—and figure out how to make it work.

“As an industrial designer, you have to take that great idea and get it
out into the world, and get it out intact. You’re not really practicing your craft if you are just developing a beautiful form and leaving it at that.”
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Brunner was so impressed that he talked to Jony about the possibility of working at Lunar. It wasn’t a formal job offer, Brunner said, but more along the lines of We think you’re great, why don’t you come and work with us? In any case, Jony said no thanks, that he had promised to return to London to work for RWG, which had supported him through college. It wasn’t the only such conversation Jony had on his California trip, as several other companies tried to lure the promising new graduate.

In the years to come, Brunner would prove an important connection for Jony. A few months after Jony’s visit, Brunner was recruited by Apple. There he set up the company’s first internal design studio, setting the stage for the work that catapulted Apple to the top of the design world. With this, Brunner tried a second time to recruit Jony.

On his return to the United Kingdom, Jony submitted a travel report to the RSA.
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In it, Jony noted that visiting San Francisco had been the highlight of the trip: “I immediately fell in love with San Francisco and desperately hope that I can return there sometime in the future,” he wrote.