BOOKS AND ARTS OCTOBER 11, 2011
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Even the “Genius” at your local Apple store admits that your dollar buys significantly more computing power in a PC. iTunes can be infuriatingly glitchy and difficult to navigate. The iPod is so delicate a flower that it breaks, seemingly, if you exhale in its vicinity.
What, then, explains a world awash in longing, admiration, and loss in the wake of Steve Jobs’ death last week at the age of 56? Americans, perhaps, suffering their own economic travails and witnessing the ongoing and pathetic spectacle of a gridlocked political system, have stumbled upon a consensus hero, for which Jobs’ public character (iconoclasm, tenacity, charisma) and personal story (good looks, up from mean beginnings to wild fortune) offers fertile ground.
Steve Jobs’ contribution, though, may lie not in not in his personal story, not in technology, and not in any single Apple product, but in that he established the indisputable importance of design—not just that it sells, but that it is a value that people hold across domains rather than a luxury. Early on, Jobs recognized that computers were intimidating machines only a tech geek would groove on, and that design could make these machines approachable by ordinary people. This, of course, has been much noted and celebrated. But that’s not enough. It’s important to understand what it is about Apple’s designs that have made the company’s products the love-objects they are today.
Sleek artistry and obsessive attention to detail do not alone make “crazy good” design. The design of Apple products transforms them from human-made machines into objects of personal affiliation. Whether Jobs knew it or not, Apple’s products tap into hard-wired psychological predispositions regarding how humans respond to objects in their environment. That is the hidden lesson of Apple and Jobs’ success.
Looking at the pixelated screen of a monitor does not draw a person into a relationship with a computer. Jobs’ first important move, in the original Macintosh, released in 1984? The mouse. Apple did not invent the mouse linked to a personal computer system; Xerox did. But Jobs’ Apple simplified the mouse, made it ergonomically pleasant to touch and manipulate, made it curvy and cute. Humans by evolution are object manipulators. Somehow, Jobs knew: If an ordinary person is to be drawn to a computer he needs a tool he can manipulate though familiar and pre-established tactile and sensorimotor schemas, which are patterned sequences of interaction with objects in the environment. With the mouse, a person no longer needed to use the keyboard’s arrow keys to move around a text. She could click around, just as, in the process of writing, she moves pen around a piece of paper.
Perhaps the success of the original Macintosh encouraged Jobs to forge further along the path of designing technology for the type of bodies humans inhabit and minds they rely on. With the mouse, Jobs demonstrated a feel for the importance of human patterns of object manipulation. That same feel subsequently drove the development of Apple’s thin, supremely portable, soft-edged laptops, iPods, and iPhones, machines that are not burdensome to carry and feel good to hold in the hand.
In the design of the Mac computers, Jobs evinced an understanding for the human propensity toward animism. Paola Antonelli, who is the Senior Curator of Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, describes her first 1990 Macintosh Classic as “like a little pup dog looking at me. It wasn’t just something I worked with; it kept me company.” People routinely describe their Apple computers, whether Macs or iPads, as friends. The iMac 1998 combined the simplicity and ease of use and set up of an all-in-one with a positively anthropomorphic design: Softly curved edges frame its human face-like screen (the disc drive, a mouth). The iMac’s overall shape looks like a human head—not as a head actually presents in the world, but as a person experiences her own and others’ heads, with the face occupying far more space in our imagination than the back of the skull. Even the company logo, an apple with one bite taken out of it, draws the consumer into an imaginative action with an object. Nearly everybody knows what it feels like to bite into an apple—as is demonstrated by the many partially consumed apples left in front of Apple stores in recent days to commemorate Jobs’ death.
These and the other user-friendly qualities of all Apple’s products are not just casings on a product. They are the product. That they sold, sold, and sell tells us something important about the value people, wittingly and unwittingly, place upon design—especially upon design that taps into the inherent nature of our bodies and our minds.
Sarah Williams Goldhagen is the architecture critic for The New Republic.
7 comments
I'm not so sure about "user-friendly qualities", at least not for older users of the small and powerful gadgets Apple has become known for in the past five years. Everything about them makes their use difficult for people my age, from the small keys on the pad, to the small font on the screen, to the flat shape of the microphone. If seeing and hearing are the key, then Apple's gadgets fail the test. But I have no use for skateboards either. Perhaps Jobs, if he had lived long enough, would have created and perfected the geriatric models of Apple's gadgets.
- rayward
October 11, 2011 at 9:42am
"These and the other user-friendly qualities of all Apple’s products are not just casings on a product. They are the product." User-friendly is not why Apple does so well. I've had to spend hours fixing my daughters iPod, in which all her music was ultimately lost. Ditto on the laptops. Apple is, at best, on par with PCs. At worst, much worse because you have the normal "gotchas" combined with a dramatically limited selection and the requisite price premium. Apple's allure is that they worked to become cool. No more, no less. iPod floundered the first 3 years. The quantity sold would have warranted a product cancellation from the likes of Intel and Microsoft, both of whom had already left the music player space for dead. And then suddenly, with the concurrent introduction of support for the PC and a big ad push from U2 and a killer ad campaign, Apple managed to convince a flashpoint of consumers that the product WAS cool. For a 50% premium for no-name music players from Taiwan, kids could own a slice of cool tech that would elevate their stature among their peers because A) it was a player that all the musicians were using and B) because, like designer jeans, it carried a price premium over the normal wares and that premium said "I care about wanting something a little bit better." And it was possible for kids to seek out this premium, because unlike a $1000 premium commanded by their laptops, the $50 premium commanded by the music player was something kids negotiate with their parents. PS. There was a common meme initially that Apple had solved the music player UI. But that supposedly wonderful UI was dropped in a heartbeat and replaced with a completely new UI later (and more traditional) down the road. Not something that is done if you've captured lightening in a bottle.
- seattleeng
October 11, 2011 at 12:38pm
I just watched Transcendent Man, a video about Ray Kurzweil, who predicts that humans are evolving into new species which will be an amalgam of human and computer. Whether Kurzweil's optimistic vision will hold up (I am less sanguine than he is, but he is much smarter than I am) is impossible to tell, but surely we are living near the end of human civilization as we knew it. Jobs was a preschool teacher along this uncertain path, and Apple's creations are our kindergarten toys.
- skahn
October 11, 2011 at 2:25pm
It is well known that Steve Jobs designed Apple's products for himself, ones that would please and delight him. He said so. It is interesting how Jobs the creator could at the same time be Jobs the user, that the latter preceded the former. Some of his products—notably the Macintosh Cube—didn't connect with Mac users. When he was in charge of design he hit and he missed. Once he found Jonathan Ives, who became Jobs' alter ego, a brilliant and inspired creator of industrial design, the hardware design flowed from their intuitive mind-bond; not to be confused with mind-meld, still it was much the same thing.
- Tgossard
October 11, 2011 at 3:12pm
A like connection was made with his software designers, though here it was more Jobs than they. But software design is easier to correct and update than hardware. I forget who formulated the first Mac Graphic User Interface Guidelines, but they were key to obtaining interface consistency across software developers' creations. One notable, and consistently aggravating, to this was Microsoft, which from the get-go went with its own, maverick (and invariably aggravating if not infuriating) interpretation of the Mac GUI. Even today, Microsoft, though much reformed, diverges from basic UI principles, with its myriad toolbars, assistants, widgets, and whatnot.
- Tgossard
October 11, 2011 at 3:25pm
Tgossard, good point. However, please note at least two "murphy's law" problems in computer design. 1. What is at one point avantgarde and groundbreaking (if flawed and problem-infested) progresses to classic and then archaic. 2. The inventors/designers/engineers of any pretty good fix/improvement/kluge that is working fairly well usually succumb to the urge/temptation to "If it ain't broke, fit it until it is broken." Microsoft, after several terrible versions of Windows, then came up with Windows 7, which works pretty well for me (at least, though I dual boot to Ubuntu Linux to cover my ass), is now inflicting Windows 8 on us, which to me at least, smells like the cycle of presenting carrion as haute cuisine once again. Your mileage may vary, of course, depending on your age and sensitivity.
- skahn
October 11, 2011 at 5:09pm
As a person who uses the mac and pc platforms (software and hardware) on a minute by minute basis for work, the two have become almost indistinguishable from each other from a GUI basis for me. I can't say I like Apple more than PC but I will say that I can't stand itunes. I also loathe the whole Apple protocols for itunes and the istore. I buy my music in various formats and simply use my ipod and shuffle for playing music. I don't need the "experience" that itunes purports to give. So I use winamp and the pc for my music management. Apple has always had an ability, while striving for intuitiveness, to make things too complicated. The document filing system is neither intuitive nor easy. Apple also has a way of making personalization and customization extremely difficult to do because Jobs' and Apple by default, always wanted to control the experience in a specific way....their way. Microsoft's GUI is clunky and functional. MS's Windows 7 is to Apple's Leopard X as Hyundai's Sonata is to Jaguar's XJS. Where Apple excels and MS doesn't is that Apple has and always will be a design company that provides the entire experience. MS wasn't and isn't. When MS tries to be a hardware and software product company it fails often (xbox not withstanding) and the only platform Apple eschewed. Apple figured out that people don't want a beige box or now the ubiquitous 'black' box of the PCs. Apple makes well designed hard products. That doesn't always mean they're completely user friendly but for most people that simply want an out-of-box experience Apple succeeds. I recall a story when the original Ipod was in design phase. The designers had to fight Jobs to keep the center button on the click wheel. Jobs wanted this clean, obtuse, minimalistic box that had no buttons and was "intuitive" to his mind. They also had to add lead weights to the mock-up to make the product feel more substantial. I think Apple makes some great laptops but their price point is ridiculous for what you get and what you don't get. I'm ready for a home upgrade soon and will get a PC to replace the old laptop only because the PC offers me more functionality, customization and flexibility. Whereas the Apple not so much. Which were also the many reasons I switched from my iphone 3G to an HTC android phone when it came time to upgrade. I won't every go back to iphone again but I will say that Apple did more for smartphone market in 4 years than Nokia, Motorola or Blackberry combined did prior to the iphone.
- singlspeed
October 12, 2011 at 4:18pm