Jony Ive on How Product Naming Influences Design Philosophy

Design education 101

He's repeating what we teach on design courses, but also to design teachers: don't be too specific in a brief. Never say 'design me a kettle', but 'design a way of boiling water'.
It's like 'don't think of an elephant'. If your brief specifies what you want rather an what you need, it's a bad brief.
It's good Apple still practices that lesson.

MacRumors said:

Just a couple days after a clip of Jony Ive's appearance on BBC's Blue Peter was revealed, journalist Tom Davenport (via CNET) says he's found an insightful portion of the clip that was cut out. In the new segment, Ive talks about how product naming philosophy can affect the design process.

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I'm confused - I saw the feature on Blue Peter and clearly remember this bit, why is this article saying it was cut out?

No more design skills at Apple ...

tkermit said:

I think his point is rather more subtle than how you should name your products. As I understood him, he suggests being careful what words you use in the design process so as to not get caught up in predefined notions of what certain words represent.

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Yes, I think that's it. I remember a large tech manufacturer that always gave unannounced products internal code-names completely unrelated to the products purpose (e.g., "Everest"). I assumed it was just a secrecy thing in case someone leaked the name. But I can see now how giving a nascent product a meaningless name frees the design team.

Here's the full video. Love the little boy's design that has a mesh bottom to let the crumbs out.

http://youtu.be/FLUn7xCuQxo

NightFox said:

I'm confused - I saw the feature on Blue Peter and clearly remember this bit, why is this article saying it was cut out?

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I'm sure it's because they are not English. They probably only saw an edited clip on Fox News or something.

I guess Blue Peter isn't on the "must watch" list for American techies.

TMar said:

OMG Apple is going to make a lunchbox... The iBox! Front page tomorrow.

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iDine. Did you not watch the video?

TMar said:

OMG Apple is going to make a lunchbox... The iBox! Front page tomorrow.

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That is the funniest thing I've ever read on this site. I can't stop laughing.

komodrone said:

when I think of iPads, I think of futuristic female toiletries

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wouldn't that be itampax or itowels...I see pad as something to write on..not bleed on !

To be outstanding you can't be average. Think of what the 99% would do and do the opposite. That seems to be Jony Ive's MO.
The man asked Jony for a lunch box and its funny how contrarian he is. He is not going to give him the box he asked for. I guess Steve did ask for a new iPod and Internet device and a Phone and Jon made the iPhone instead. Classic!

BlazednSleepy said:

I never realized how down to earth and sweet this guy is. I figured that being apart of on the biggest corporations in world would mess with his ego. Good for him. Can't wait to see his take on software design.

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He strikes me as being very humble. That bit at the end where he presents the aluminum logo and the presenters says "this is great" and Jony replies "I'm so glad you like it" and you can see he really means it. Top bloke!

While everyone thinks Apple's failure will happen now that SJ is gone, I think Apple's failure will happen after Ive's departure/death.

slicecom said:

You're stupid if you buy 1st gen. Wait for the retina iBox.

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It's already retina. I can't make out the pixels.

sshhoott said:

You're kind of right. For the iphone, Apple may have something new and refreshing coming up for the iPhone. But the main criticism for iPhone 5 is not the actual aesthetics and functionality of design, its the dated iOS and lack of a big screen with a proper aspect ratio (instead of just tall). Also, I believe, the new iMac is criticized mainly for the performance hit (5400RPM HDD) it took from the thin design and the resulting inaccessibility, not the actual design itself. So these issues are indirectly related to design but mainly have to do with hardware engineering, but damn they still look so good.

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there has been criticism of the how little the aesthetics of the last few versions of the iphone has changed and of course the whole scratching saga with the current one which is a 100% design issue.

lack of optical drive and upgrade options due to the limitations of the design.

one can only assume that jonys ever growing impact is the reason for these limitations. the customers end up with a less functional device in the end with a pseudo thinness. its becoming backwards at apple. its lets make it thin and lets make light and then its lets see what we can fill it up with.

numlock said:

there has been criticism of the how little the aesthetics of the last few versions of the iphone has changed and of course the whole scratching saga with the current one which is a 100% design issue.

lack of optical drive and upgrade options due to the limitations of the design.

one can only assume that jonys ever growing impact is the reason for these limitations. the customers end up with a less functional device in the end with a pseudo thinness. its becoming backwards at apple. its lets make it thin and lets make light and then its lets see what we can fill it up with.

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What evidence is there that the lack of optical drive or upgrade options are driven by Ive? Could very well be that Apple sees optical drive as something trending out of the product line and as a result of not having an optical drive they were a able to make a thiner machine that weighed less. I highly doubt the #1 consideration on the new iMac was getting a 5mm edge.

Naming as misdirection

MacRumors said:

... Jony Ive on How Product Naming Influences Design Philosophy

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Product naming also influences public perception of products. And it can fool would-be competitors into making fatal mistakes. As an example of public perception, I think the term "iPod" probably hurt sales initially. Yes, I know the name helped to prevent Apple's then-only-MP3 player from being stuck in the "music player" niche. And yes, "iPod" continued the "i"-something naming trend started with iMac.

But sales of iPod were pretty slow initially. It took a long time for iPod to become dominant. In part because it was totally unknown territory for Apple, and also in part because iTunes was originally only available on Mac for the first two years. But if you didn't already know what an iPod was, you couldn't guess its purpose by its name.

Skip forward to 2007, Steve Jobs announces iPhone at MWSF, and the post-PC era begins in earnest. The name implies that yes, it's a phone. And Steve himself repeated the message: "An iPod, a phone, an internet mobile communicator..." All true, but the world's attention was locked on iPhone's multi-touch interface and its industrial design. Even now, more than six years after the iPhone was first announced, fans and detractors obsess over iPhone's hardware details, specs, and design. Forest for the trees.

Steve actually went on to explain that iPhone runs "OS X," albeit a drastically slimmed-down version. So he didn't try to hide iPhone's true nature as mobile computer. Yet it still took years for competitors to grasp that concept. RIM thought they were safe with BlackBerry and its killer app: email. They weren't. Nokia thought they were safe with updated Symbian-based touchscreen plus slider-keyboard smartphones. They weren't. Palm and Microsoft thought they could milk their legacy keyboard-and-stylus driven OSes. They couldn't.

So why not? I think the name "iPhone" helped lead the wannabes down the wrong path. They just added features to their existing smartphones and OSes instead of starting from scratch and building a phone-sized mobile computer. They though they could compete with phones that happened to be able to run apps. Fatal mistake for nearly all of them.

I hope the name iOS7 inspires them to actually think of something new!

numlock said:

lack of optical drive and upgrade options due to the limitations of the design.

one can only assume that jonys ever growing impact is the reason for these limitations. the customers end up with a less functional device in the end with a pseudo thinness. its becoming backwards at apple. its lets make it thin and lets make light and then its lets see what we can fill it up with.

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Or, people are hardly using discs anymore so they decided to biff them and lead the change as they often do. The drives are the most unreliable component because of their moving parts (debatable).

Once you biff the drive then it alters the design of the product. I can't conceive that Apple would throw away useful items to make things thinner. They're all about making great products that customers want generally.

I think throwing the drive out is the right move. I didn't agree with the idea at first but now think it's right. And lets face it they pulled them out of the laptops first.

designgeek said:

this man is a genius. What i wouldn't give to have a one hour conversation with him.

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+1

tkermit said:

Don't know if it's the best example in this context, but I'm kind of reminded of some of the early hard-drive based MP3 players right around the time the first iPod was released, that looked like portable CD players for some reason:
Image

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I knew someone that owned one of those. If you had 2,000 songs, you had to do next / prev to get to that song. That product was terrible.

BornAgainMac said:

I knew someone that owned one of those. If you had 2,000 songs, you had to do next / prev to get to that song. That product was terrible.

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The good old days (take out the word good to make the sentence correct)

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numlock said:

there has been criticism of the how little the aesthetics of the last few versions of the iphone has changed and of course the whole scratching saga with the current one which is a 100% design issue.

lack of optical drive and upgrade options due to the limitations of the design.

one can only assume that jonys ever growing impact is the reason for these limitations. the customers end up with a less functional device in the end with a pseudo thinness. its becoming backwards at apple. its lets make it thin and lets make light and then its lets see what we can fill it up with.

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No. The sooner physical media dies the better, seriously it's 2013 who actually needs CD's or DVD's? Netflix, Grooveshark, Spotify, Nokia Music, App Stores and downloads from the internet - there is no reason for CD's except for wasting space in your home (or turning the disks into funky clocks)

You are probably someone who complained when VHS playing functionally was remove from the dual VHS DVD players - or someone who would have complained when Apple remove floppy drives from their machines!

Rogifan said:

What evidence is there that the lack of optical drive or upgrade options are driven by Ive? Could very well be that Apple sees optical drive as something trending out of the product line and as a result of not having an optical drive they were a able to make a thiner machine that weighed less. I highly doubt the #1 consideration on the new iMac was getting a 5mm edge.

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did i say it was driven by him. he is however the top guy and this is where the imac is going (mini as well). if design is getting the upper hand over function then who should i look towards?

im sure more people use optical drives than apples firewire part deux.

http://www.apple.com/imac/

the top two images seem to highlight its misleading thinness. i dont know how much adding an optical drive adds to the weight but for a computer on a desk it makes no difference.

Or, people are hardly using discs anymore so they decided to biff them and lead the change as they often do. The drives are the most unreliable component because of their moving parts (debatable).

Once you biff the drive then it alters the design of the product. I can't conceive that Apple would throw away useful items to make things thinner. They're all about making great products that customers want generally.

I think throwing the drive out is the right move. I didn't agree with the idea at first but now think it's right. And lets face it they pulled them out of the laptops first.

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on a mobile computer i have much less problem with removing the drive but on a desktop i dont see the difference a few mm or hundreds of grams make. if you dont use then you can feel bad you paid for something you dont use.

No. The sooner physical media dies the better, seriously it's 2013 who actually needs CD's or DVD's? Netflix, Grooveshark, Spotify, Nokia Music, App Stores and downloads from the internet - there is no reason for CD's except for wasting space in your home (or turning the disks into funky clocks)

You are probably someone who complained when VHS playing functionally was remove from the dual VHS DVD players - or someone who would have complained when Apple remove floppy drives from their machines!

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you do realize that not everyone shares your views and not everyone has access to high speed internet?

i own a vcr but dont recall making complaints back then. the imac was also the first mac i was thinking about getting as a young adult (after using macs for around 10 years prior) and its omission of a floppy drive didnt make it less attractive to me. and to me the optical drive is not the floppy drive of 1997.

numlock said:

did i say it was driven by him. he is however the top guy and this is where the imac is going (mini as well). if design is getting the upper hand over function then who should i look towards?

im sure more people use optical drives than apples firewire part deux.

http://www.apple.com/imac/

the top two images seem to highlight its misleading thinness. i dont know how much adding an optical drive adds to the weight but for a computer on a desk it makes no difference.




on a mobile computer i have much less problem with removing the drive but on a desktop i dont see the difference a few mm or hundreds of grams make. if you dont use then you can feel bad you paid for something you dont use.



you do realize that not everyone shares your views and not everyone has access to high speed internet?

i own a vcr but dont recall making complaints back then. the imac was also the first mac i was thinking about getting as a young adult (after using macs for around 10 years prior) and its omission of a floppy drive didnt make it less attractive to me. and to me the optical drive is not the floppy drive of 1997.

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Before I got Fibre internet I was running Netflix flawlessly on 0.8mb/s so I don't think it's anything to do with fast internet. You do realise that by Apple removing optical drives is just going to drive fast internet - just like the iPhone and similar smart phones drives fast mobile internet. It's the change of devices which creates a change in the services we use. I can't wait to physical media is dead - furthermore that includes paper and printers, seriously in 2013 I don't understand my printing should be necessary in any situation...

runeapple said:

Before I got Fibre internet I was running Netflix flawlessly on 0.8mb/s so I don't think it's anything to do with fast internet. You do realise that by Apple removing optical drives is just going to drive fast internet - just like the iPhone and similar smart phones drives fast mobile internet. It's the change of devices which creates a change in the services we use. I can't wait to physical media is dead - furthermore that includes paper and printers, seriously in 2013 I don't understand my printing should be necessary in any situation...

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since you mention netflix you do also realize that netflix or a service of its size and kind is not available everywhere? i could only access netflix through a proxy for instance.

you seriously think foreign town councils and countries are going to get faster internet connection because of something apple does? btw we are only talking about internet speed here and not the cost of the connection.

was the iphone the first phone to get 3g or 4g?

i dont disagree with you on printing. i do as little of that as i can.

numlock said:

since you mention netflix you do also realize that netflix or a service of its size and kind is not available everywhere? i could only access netflix through a proxy for instance.

you seriously think foreign town councils and countries are going to get faster internet connection because of something apple does? btw we are only talking about internet speed here and not the cost of the connection.

was the iphone the first phone to get 3g or 4g?

i dont disagree with you on printing. i do as little of that as i can.

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No iPhone wasn't first to have either of those - but it brought the the full web to the phone which in turn mainstreamed and improved these services - note I did say "and similar smartphones".

Glad you agree with printing - it's one less thing to argue about haha!

Netflix is easy to get on any device in any country with unblocks us - or you can use a free VPN to do it at no extra cost.

I don't think foreign councils will get fast internet - but I think the providing companies will - if theres a demand they will obviously invest if it means more profits - the councils may have to agree to have fibre cables installed etc.. but I can't imagine they will complain if they are getting paid from the providing companies.