The Magic of Apple is really about the Magic of Design

The iPad came out last year and since then I have counted over 300 articles, commentaries and newspaper reports on both Apple as a company and as a cultural phenomenon with the iPad as the focus. I am sure that I have missed many hundreds more.

Most of the articles talk about Apple having a “magic touch” or “they seem to be magically aware of what consumers want.” Financial writers and researchers talk about a company whose valuations have gone into the stratosphere. The stock which just a few years ago was thirty dollars is now worth over 350 dollars.

So, what is all this magic about? I would like to suggest that there is only a little bit of magic and a great deal of wisdom. The wisdom is drawn from Apple’s intense connection to Design processes best exemplified by the central role played by Jonathan Ive, a graduate of the Royal College of Art and Senior Vice-President of Industrial Design at Apple. Ive is responsible for many of Apple’s innovations, including the iPad.

Design both as a profession and as a creative activity is not well understood. This has a great deal to do with the narrow base of knowledge of most commentators, but also reflects a general lack of comprehension about the role of the creative economy in the 21^st century.

For many, Design is “just” a craft, for others Design seems to be connected to architecture and engineering. For me, Design is about knowledge, knowledge production and the integration of knowledge into every aspect of how a company, community and learning institution works. Design is very much about putting intelligence into objects (see the work of James Dyson) as well as brokering relationships among creative people, entrepreneurs, outputs and audiences.

Designers often act like ethnographers. They learn how to examine everything from managerial processes in companies to how the best conditions for creative innovation can be generated from different clusters of people working within varied and often dramatically dissimilar contexts.

Most people work or live among clusters of people and for the most part, clusters are like networks. It is always a challenge to understand how information and intelligence flows through networks and designers are uniquely equipped to comprehend not only flow but the translation of relationships into productive innovation.

Apple from the start has always emphasized design not only to make computers look better, but also and more importantly in order to better understand how people use computers. This is why the Apple graphic user interface remains among the friendliest of any computer company and also why their mobile operating systems are transparently easy to use. Android comes close but only because they have copied Apple’s strategies. So, the magic of Apple is actually carefully designed and is evidence of some brilliant strategic choices, quite the opposite of the accidental. Good innovation most often gains its strength from good design, something Apple understood many years ago. 

TRIUMF (The Art and Science of Particle Physics)

I visited the TRIUMF lab at the University of British Columbia this week. This is one of three labs in the world that has the capacity to move the material world around at high speed to study the characteristics of sub-atomic matter. The other two are in Chicago (FermiLab) and Switzerland (CERN).

TRIUMF outlined three goals in its 2008 Mission Statement:

• Make discoveries that address the most compelling questions in particle physics, nuclear physics, nuclear medicine, and materials science
• Act as Canada's steward for the advancement of particle accelerators and detection technologies
• Transfer knowledge, train highly skilled personnel, and commercialize research for the economic, social, environmental, and health benefit of all Canadians 

So, what was a humanities/art/design person like myself doing at Triumf? Well, Emily Carr has a collaboration with the lab that links science and art in a really interesting and productive way. Students from Emily Carr are working on visualizations of what Triumf does, which is gaze into those parts of the material world that the naked eye will never be able to see. Of course, the debate between the sciences and the arts has been going on for a long time. Suffice to say, that the differences are there, but the similarities, that is the desire to engage in creative thinking and output are shared.

It was artists and scientists working in close proximity who developed a deeper understanding of perspective which led among other things to a fundamental shift in painting but also to a profound change in a variety of technologies. 

Artists and scientists have always been early adopters and developers of new technologies. The interactions are too numerous to mention. This quote summarizes the potential and the beauty of art and science meeting on a common ground.

"The materials in art pieces are universal. The sinuous molecules that bind pigments in oil paint are like those that beaded up in Earth’s primeval oceans to form the first cell. Glass is a translucent form of sand and is representative of the mineral content of the Earth’s mantle and Earth-like planets elsewhere. Metal is a relic of supernovae, the fiery stellar cataclysms that also enable biology by forging and ejecting life’s elements. Wood panels and paper are among the means by which formerly living things are brought into our service, making art an indirect homage to carbon and biology." The Living Cosmos: A Fabric That Binds Art and Science by Chris Impey and Heather Green (Leonardo, Volume 43, Number 5, October 2010, pp. 435-441)