Design in the 21st Century: A Coffee with Barry Katz (Part 7)

SM: What is your interpretation of what is going on in Steve Job’s head that allows him to do something really interesting and leapfrogging with design every time?

BK: I don’t think it is every time. Apple has cultivated a mystique of the ‘magic Job’s touch’.

SM: He did look outside of America to get the first design. That tells me he is thinking out of the box.

BK: He is a very complex and smart guy as well as a huge risk taker which has nearly cost him his job. Job’s has been very contemptuous of the guiding value proposition adopted by most electronics companies. I did an interview with him some years ago and it was striking how he referred to some of his competitors in very blunt and explicit terms. He mocked their idea that a value proposition could be the increase of disk storage space by 30%. He said, “That is a value proposition? That is just a technical spec. How can you allow a technical spec to define a product or even a product category?” I found that admirable.

He also made an astonishing hire of Johnny [Jonathan] Ive who is the VP of Design. Johnny started out as the head of the Apple Industrial Design group which is located in a little shed to the side of the main building. I remember the first time I met him I walked in and there were all of these shapes under blankets. I said, “I guess that is all the stuff I am not allowed to see?” He said, “No, I will show you. That is the stuff that Apple executives are not allowed to see.”

They were very experimental items. He came out of consultancy in London called Tangerine. What he worked on prior to Apple was plumbing fixtures. If you look at the pristine white surfaces of the iPod they bear some relations to standard sinks and bathtubs.

SM: I find it interesting that you also think Job’s has an intrinsic ability to ask bigger questions. I think that is a defining value of his existence.

BK: The larger significance of what you just said about Job’s is that this is a field and industry that has moved with incredible volatility over the last 35 years. There have been pockets of great technological ingenuity around the world for 3,000 years or more. If you were in the perfume industry in the 6th century then you wanted to be in Corinth. If you were an industrial manufacture in 18th century then it was Manchester. What you have never seen in history, so far as I am aware, is a layering like we have in this case. It starts with the microprocessor, moves to the personal computer, then to software, then to the Internet, and now it is on to biotech.

We have the biggest concentration of that type of design in the world and it is all layered and interrelated. It has developed a climate of innovation and sequential development which is historically unprecedented. In our environment if you are standing still you are moving backwards and if you are moving forward too slowly you are standing still. You have to be trying new things all the time. Job’s is one person who can do that.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Design in the 21st Century: A Coffee with Barry Katz
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