I remember always being interested in made objects. The fact they had been designed was not obvious or even interesting to me initially. As a kid, I remember taking apart whatever I could get my hands on. Later, this developed into more of an interest in how they were made, how they worked, their form and material.

Jonathan Ive

By the age of thirteen or fourteen I was pretty certain that I wanted to draw and make stuff. I knew that I wanted to design but I had no idea what I’d design as I was interested in everything: cars, products, furniture, jewellery, boats. After visiting a few design consultancies I eventually decided that product design would be a pretty good foundation as it seemed the most general. I studied art and design at school and went on to Newcastle Polytechnic. I figured out some basic stuff — that form and colour defines your perception of the nature of an object, whether or not it is intended to. I learnt the fundamentals of how you make things and I started to understand the historical and cultural context of an object’s design. I wish my drawing skills had improved, but while that bothered me then, it doesn't now.

Jonathan Ive

I was pretty naïve. I hadn't been out of college for long but I learnt lots by designing a range of different objects: from hair combs and ceramics, to power tools and televisions. Importantly, I worked out what I was good at and what I was bad at. It became pretty clear what I wanted to do. I was really only interested in design. I was neither interested, nor good at building a business.

Jonathan Ive

I went through college having a real problem with computers. I was convinced that I was technically inept, which was frustrating as I wanted to use computers to help me with various aspects of my design. Right at the end of my time at college I discovered the Mac. I remember being astounded at just how much better it was than anything else I had tried to use. I was struck by the care taken with the whole user experience. I had a sense of connection via the object with the designers. I started to learn more about the company, how it had been founded, its values and its structure. The more I learnt 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. In the early 1990s, I was living in London again and working with a number of clients in Japan, the US and Europe at Tangerine. Apple did a search to find a new design consultant and decided to work with me. I still remember Apple describing this fantastic opportunity and being so nervous that I would mess it all up. While I had never thought that I could work successfully as part of a corporation — always assuming that I would work independently — at the end of a big programme of work for Apple, I decided to accept a full-time position there and to move to California.

Jonathan Ive

One of my reasons for joining Apple had been a frustration associated with consulting. Working externally made it difficult to have a profound impact on product plans and to truly innovate. By the time you had accepted a commission, so many of the critical decisions had already been made. Increasingly I had also come to believe that to do something fundamentally new requires dramatic change from many parts of an organisation. When I joined Apple the company was in decline. It seemed to have lost what had once been a very clear sense of identity and purpose. Apple had started trying to compete to an agenda set by an industry that had never shared its goals. While as a designer I was certainly closer to where the decisions were being made, but I was only marginally more effective or influential than I had been as a consultant. This only changed when Steve Jobs (co-founder of Apple) returned to the company. By re-establishing the core values he had established at the beginning, Apple again pursued a direction which was clear and different from any other company. Design and innovation formed an important part of this new direction.

Jonathan Ive

It is pretty humbling when so much of your effectiveness is defined by context. Not only is it critical that the leadership of a company clearly understands its products and the role of design, but that the development, marketing and sales teams are also equally committed to the same goals. More than ever I am aware that what we have achieved with design is massively reliant on the commitment of lots of different teams to solve the same problems and on their sharing the same goals. I like being part of something that is bigger than design. There is a loyalty that I have for Apple and a belief that this company has an impact beyond design which feels important. I also have a sense of being accountable as we really live, sometimes pretty painfully with the consequences of what we do.

Jonathan Ive

I had been concerned that moving away from working independently for a number of clients on a broad range of products would be difficult. Surprisingly this has not been an issue, as we are really designing systems that include so many different components — headphones, remote controls, a mouse, speakers, as well as computers. The issue has really been the focus on designing technologically based products. I love working within such a relatively new product category. The opportunities are remarkable as you can be working on just one product that can instantly shatter an entire history of product types and implicated systems. The iPod is a good example as it is not only a very new product but it clearly turns our users’ previous experience and understanding of storing and listening to music upside down.

Jonathan Ive

In the 1970s, Apple talked about being at the intersection of technology and the arts. I think that the product qualities are really consequent to the bigger goals that were established when the company was founded. The defining qualities are about use: ease and simplicity. Caring beyond the functional imperative, we also acknowledge that products have a significance way beyond traditional views of function.

Jonathan Ive

We have assembled a heavenly design team. By keeping the core team small and investing significantly in tools and process, we can work with a level of collaboration that seems particularly rare. Our physical environment reflects and enables that collaborative approach. The large open studio and massive sound system support a number of communal design areas. We have little exclusively personal space. In fact, the memory of how we work will endure beyond the products of our work.

Jonathan Ive

Perhaps the decisive factor is fanatical care beyond the obvious stuff: the obsessive attention to details that are often overlooked, like cables and power adaptors. Take the iMac — our attempts to make it less exclusive and more accessible occurred at a number of different levels. A detail example is the handle. While its primary function is obviously associated with making the product easy to move, a compelling part of its function is the immediate connection it makes with the user by unambiguously referencing the hand. That reference represents, at some level, an understanding beyond the iMac’s core function. Seeing an object with a handle, you instantly understand aspects of its physical nature — I can touch it, move it, it’s not too precious. With the Power Mac G4 Cube, we created a techno-core suspended in a single piece of plastic. You don’t often get to design something out of one piece of plastic. This was about simplifying — removing clutter, not just visual but audio clutter. That’s why the core is suspended in air. The air enters the bottom face and without a fan, therefore very quietly, travels through the internal heat sink. Movement within the cube is all vertical — the air, the circuit boards and even the CD eject vertically. The core is easily removed for access to internal stuff.

Jonathan Ive

Materials, processes, product architecture and construction are huge drivers in design. Polymer advances mean that we can now create composites to meet very specific functional goals and requirements. From a processing point of view we can now do things with plastic that we were previously told were impossible. Twin shooting materials, moulding different plastics together or co-moulding plastic to metal, gives us a range of functional and formal opportunities that really didn’t exist before. The iPod is made from twin-shot plastic with no fasteners and no battery doors enabling us to create a design which was dense completely sealed. Metal forming and, in particular, new methods of joining metals with advanced adhesives and laser welding is another exciting area right now.

Jonathan Ive

New products that replace multiple products with substantial histories is obviously exciting for us. I think another catalyst is the tenacity and high expectations of consumers. With the iPod, the MP3 phenomenon gave us an opportunity to develop an entirely new product and one which could carry 4,000 songs. The big wrestle was to trying to develop something that was new, that felt new and that had a meaning relevant to what it was.

Jonathan Ive

So many companies are competing against each other with similar agendas. Being superficially different is the goal of so many of the products we see. A preoccupation with differentiation is the concern of many corporations rather than trying to innovate and genuinely taking the time, investing the resources and caring enough to try and make something better.

Jonathan Ive

We've been working on this product called Apple Watch. It's been one of the most intriguing programmes because the sort of transition of architectural technology, that became a little bit more personal and made its way into the home, a little bit more personal and into your pocket, this leap to what's worn is a really significant one and there have been some brilliant people in the last few centuries dealing with these issues.

Jonathan Ive

Yes, I still haven't lost that sort of wonder of the creative process, and I still think it's the most extraordinary process the way that it comes from nothing. The best ideas, just as Magistretti was saying, they start as conversations, don't they? If it's a big idea, I think you can distil that idea into a few sentences. It's a very fragile process because sentences are sometimes easier to mess up than an object, and so I've felt over the years, one of things I've had to learn a lot about is if it's a sentence it's about listening, and listening very, very carefully because at the earliest stage, a small change that we make right at the beginning defines an entirely different product at the end, so particularly at the very beginning of ideas, we have to have incredible discipline to listen really hard, and to realise and map out how we're going to end up somewhere different if we make these decisions.

Jonathan Ive

I think that's a difficult one. They can last not so long because they're used multiple hours of every day. They can not last as long as you'd wished they did, because the technology relative to what's now available is so much more compelling. I think that's why we all find there is a certain delight in what tends to be singular function objects, because there's less of a requirement on the technology. I think it's a really tough one to compare those sorts of products and those discussions can become hopelessly simplistic.

Jonathan Ive

I think what it means is that for those products we are going to use for so many hours every day and are at that point of interface of incredible intimacy between us and the people we care about the most, I think what it means is that we need to invest as much care in how we develop them, as much care as possible in the materials that we use to actually make them. My interpretation is that we acknowledge that our responsibility as designers is important.

Jonathan Ive

I think the skills are essentially the same. The thing that I find very sad, and I understand why, is that so many of the designers we interview don’t know how to make stuff, because workshops in design schools are expensive and a computer is cheaper. Computer rendering can make a really dreadful design look palatable, and I think that’s just tragic that you spend four years of your life studying the design of three dimensional objects and not make one. Now, that’s great if the ultimate result was to be a graphic image, that’s fine obviously, but how on earth you can do that if what you’re responsible to produce is a three dimensional object? So I think in some ways I’m feeling that the expectation, the contribution that the object can make is more important than ever, because these devices now are so unbelievably powerful in terms of what they can do in isolation and in terms of connecting us to each other.

Jonathan Ive

Can you imagine you’ve got ten projects you’re working on and each of those ten could have a profound impact on culture in a good way, you really believe, and then you start to realise these four at least aren’t going to work. You don’t believe that we have some ordained right for them to work, they just don’t work unfortunately. For example with the phone, there were so many times when it really didn’t look like that was going to work and we nearly stopped. Do you know the George Bernard Shaw quote about innovation and being unreasonable? It’s a really beautiful thing to say, because to do something new that’s truly innovative, it does require that you reject reason.

Jonathan Ive