Like any excellent novels, this book is so impossible to put down! I am more than fascinated by his approach to the design process and the influences placed upon him as he grew up and studied the industrial design. In addition, it is more than a biography about Jony Ive; it also highlighted the tumultous challenges and hurdles of shifting the end result from engineering perspectives to design process as well as the difficult environment at Apple when the engineers and executives had a final say in the design process.
The book described the exacting attention to the detail in his design process and end result that made Apple products very sought after. For instance, Jony insisted on the design process that favours the intimate human interaction with the machine rather than the end result from the engineering and manufacturing limitations. Because of him, the consumers have developed the taste for the 'organic' and 'humanistic' machines, which made iMac and iBook in translucent casing a roaring success in the late 1990s and iPod in the early 2000s. With Steve Jobs, Jony Ive had shifted the paradigm of interacting with the machines for the 21st century when the end result is finally consumer-oriented first instead of machine-oriented that dominated the electronic devices for many years. Jony Ive forced the engineers to work with him on stripping down the components to the minimium requirements while challenged them to seek the different approach of putting the components together. The result is amazingly high quality products with fewer pieces and manufacturing process that would be unthinkable or impossible in the past.
Jony Ive and Steve Jobs wanted the minimalistic approach to the human interaction, design process, and engineering that made the unknown or untried manufacturing process and material into the mainstream only to be copied or adopted by other companies. Thus, Jony Ive explored different material and manufacturing process while pushing the engineering and manufacturing envelopes many times over. He took lot of risk in using the completely different or untried manufacturing process and different materials. The PowerBook Titanium was brilliant from the design and engineering perspective but deeply flawed during the use in the real world. The arm for iMac G4 with 'floating monitor' was absolutely an engineering feat: one can use a finger to move the monitor effortlessly. The milled aluminium was very expensive and could not be done in large quantities prior to the unibody MacBook.
The proverbial icing on the cake was his work on iPhone and iPad.
Of course, it highlighted some information from other sources such as Walter Isaacson's book, Steve Jobs, especially the close relationship with Steve Jobs who challenged Jony Ive to continue seeking perfect design solutions. That is understandable given the Apple's reputation of maintaining tight lips and keeping everything very close to the chest.
I would recommend this book to the students of industrial design and to the people who are involved in the industrial design. And to the engineers, too!
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Reviews with images
Horrible print quality
Many of these pages are near impossible to read without getting a headache. Very confused with the poor quality. I would appreciate being sent another copy that doesn’t have this double font artifacting.
