Why Apple is the Master Craftsman

Whatever you may think about Apple there is no denying that they continue to set new standards for craft. Craft? Yes, that seemingly old-fashioned word that many confine to quilting, scrap-booking and other pursuits often disparagingly categorized as women’s activities. My alma mater, the California College of the Arts, dropped the word craft from its name years ago, feeling that it was dragging the image of the school down. But craft as a concept has made something of a comeback in recent years, and no-one in the mass-production realm is doing it better than Apple.

That’s no accident. It’s the result of enormous amounts of hard work and financial investment, much more than most companies are willing to stomach. Apple’s head of design, Jonathon Ive, said in a recent rare interview with design site Core 77 about the iPhone 4:

“A big part of the experience of a physical object has to do with the materials. [At Apple] we experiment with and explore materials, processing them, learning about the inherent properties of the material—and the process of transforming it from raw material to finished product; for example, understanding exactly how the processes of machining it or grinding it affect it. That understanding, that preoccupation with the materials and processes, is [very] essential to the way we work.”

High quality craft comes about from an interplay between a material and a person, whether they be a woodworker, metal-smith, designer, engineer, or production-line worker. Good craft comes from intimate familiarity and ongoing hands-on manipulation of the material and the forms it can make, not from abstractly visualizing the form as is often done through CAD renderings. They can be highly photorealistic, but often not usefully informative to the design process as they lack tangibility. Ive goes on to say:

“The best design explicitly acknowledges that you cannot disconnect the form from the material—the material informs the form. It is the polar opposite of working virtually in CAD to create an arbitrary form that you then render as a particular material, annotating a part and saying ‘that’s wood’ and so on. Because when an object’s materials, the materials’ processes and the form are all perfectly aligned, that object has a very real resonance on lots of levels. People recognize that object as authentic and real in a very particular way.”

Forty years ago, design philosopher and master wood craftsman David Pye argued that design is always limited by budget, not technique. The ideal form promised by superior technique, he said, will always lose out to affordability, and therefore design will always be compromised. What is remarkable about Apple is that they have navigated around this paradox to a large extent. Obviously they don’t make the cheapest computers around, but they have brought a incredibly high level of quality to everyday products at prices that many people can afford and an increasing number are happy to pay. It used to be that you had to pay tens of thousands of dollars for an object with this degree of precision, whether it was jewelry, a car, or a fine watch.

Apple has done it by taking techniques and materials that everyone else uses for small-batch prototyping, and scaled them up to be mass-production ready, such as how it carves out aluminum blocks to create the shells for everything from iPod Nanos to MacBook Pros to the new Mac Mini. They work closely and over the long term with a small set of suppliers to hone the techniques and get the costs out, rather than doing what everyone else does which is to shop around every year to different vendors, always hunting for the lowest price. Apple isn’t afraid to “single source” a technique, technology or material from a vendor if it gives the right affect and advantage, while other companies avoid like the plague being locked into single vendors.

And of course Apple has famously fanatical attention to every detail that starts at the very top with Steve Jobs, and percolates out to the rest of the company. Apple is certainly not unique if you look across all companies in all industries, but very few - if any - of their direct competitors have it.

So it’s not magical how Apple does what it does with the quality of its products. It’s just that most other companies don’t have the patience, budget allocations, or sheer will to pull it off.

The Five Levels of Sketching

My sketching skills have gone to heck as I don’t do it enough anymore, but I appreciate people who really do it well and fluidly. This article nicely categorizes different types of sketches, each of which have their own purpose.

SJSU Industrial Design Final Show

San Jose State’s industrial design department is having its final show on Monday, May 18. If you’re in the area, check it out! It’s being held in the rotunda at San Jose City Hall, from 6 to 9:30pm.

Find out more >

Palm Treo Pro: Not digging it

Underwhelming. That’s the word that comes to mind when I look at the new Palm Treo Pro. Yes, nicer looking for sure, with a strong influence from the lower-cost Centro model (and looking rather like the upcoming Blackberry Bold). And it has 3G and WiFi, which is great, and the newest version of Windows Mobile, and GPS, though these can also be found on existing competitors. So it’s got a decent package of features, but what’s so compelling about it that isn’t being offered elsewhere?

In this day and age, offering a screen that takes up less than 50% of the device, especially with as big borders around it as the Pro has, just doesn’t cut it. I’m not suggesting touchscreen only here, as I definitely prefer typing on a physical keyboard to tapping on a virtual one, but really, even a business-oriented device like this one is going to be used to show off photos, looking at web pages, etc. which all benefit from a large screen. 320x320 has been the Palm standard for years now. Heck, even the Palm Tungsten T3 I had 4 years ago had a 50% bigger screen, albeit without a physical keyboard. The Pro’s screen already looks small, and will look even more diminutive over its product lifecycle given how slowly Palm brings out new models.

Size-wise the Pro is almost identical to Blackberries, though longer. It’s fatter than the iPhone. So no real advantage in pocketability or bragging rights there.

The talk time and battery life are good, but the 2MP camera is ho-hum.

In this video Palm talks about how the Windows interface is great because it mimics what people are used to on their desktops. Ironically, as Rob Haitani, the software architect for Palm back in the day used to talk about, the whole philosophy of the original Palm OS was that you should not try to mimic a big-screen mouse/screen environment, because it was not optimized for small-screen direct touch interactions. Transferring desktop interaction patterns onto a handheld was just not efficient, and which is why the early versions of Windows Mobile were slow to use. Now they’ve adopted the Windows platform on this device, Palm has to sing the opposite song.

Palm got a lot right in their earliest models, but they’ve struggled to stay innovative and focused in the last few years.

In the video they also talk about how they wanted to take care of all the little details. It looks like they’ve done that, but by focusing on the small things Palm’s come up with a device that treads water in the market. There are no big things that really push the boat out further compared to other smartphones, no marquee features that really stand out from the increasingly large and diverse crowd. With the current state of the smartphone market, that’s just not good enough to move the needle on their dwindling market share and attract new customers to the Palm brand.

Design of Beijing Olympics Medals

If you’ve been wondering about the design of the medals being presented at this year’s Olympics in Beijing, here is an interview with the man who led the design, Professor Xiao Yong. Like so much else at the Beijing games, from the Euro starchitects’ buildings combined with the massive traditional front gate, the medals are a combination of European and Chinese traditions. They combine the usual bronze, silver and gold metals with stone, specifically jade. 

Their front side is traditional. There’s Nike, the Greek goddess of victory, and the Panathinaiko Stadium in Athens, where the first Modern Olympic Games was held in 1896 thanks to the tireless efforts of Baron Pierre de Coubertin.
It’s the reverse side that makes it a perfect blend of the West and East, rather Chinese. A ring of elegance, nobility and virtue adds that essential touch of Chinese culture to the medals. And as any Chinese would tell you, the ring couldn’t be made of anything but jade for only jade can represent all the three qualities.

I love this quote by Professor Xiao Yong: “In fact, the process was quite sophisticated, while the result was quite simple.” As so often happens, the best simple things result from a complex process.

Personally I think they are very elegant and understated.

Tip of the hat to Design Sojourn

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