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Vogue profiles Jony Ive: the man behind Apple Watch

By Alvin Soon - on 2 Oct 2014, 12:00pm

Vogue profiles Jony Ive: the man behind Apple Watch

Vogue has a rare profile on Jonathan Ive, Apple's reclusive Senior Vice President of Design.

In 1997, Jonathan Ive was about to leave a dying Apple, when Steve Jobs returned to the company. Jobs recruited Ive to help him design the return of Apple, and their first collaboration was the iMac, a colourful, egg-shaped PC that changed the way people thought computers could look like. The MacBook, iPod, iPhone and iPad has since followed.

As usual with Apple, Ive doesn't disclose anything about the company's future plans, but focuses instead on his (and by extension, Apple's) design philosophy.

Throughout, Ive has refined Apple’s design process, which, he argues, is almost abstract in its devotion to pure idea: Good design creates the market; ideas are king. And here’s the next irony that defines Ive’s career: In the clutter of contemporary culture, where hits and likes threaten to overtake content in value, the purity of an idea takes on increasing currency. “I think now more than ever it’s important to be clear, to be singular,” he says, “and to have a perspective, one you didn’t generate as the result of doing a lot of focus groups.” Developing concepts and creating prototypes leads to “fascinating conversations” with his team, says Ive. “It’s a process I’ve been practicing for decades, but I still have the same wonder.”

It seems that Vogue managed to score one-on-one time with the Apple Watch, ahead of its launch.

On my second visit to Cupertino, Ive has finally handed it over: the new Apple Watch. It is more watch than the computer geeks would ever have imagined, has more embedded software than in a Rolex wearer’s wildest dreams. When Ive shows it to me—weeks before the product’s exhaustive launch, hosted by new CEO Tim Cook—in a situation room that has us surrounded by guards, it feels like a matter of national security. Yet despite all the pressure, he really just wants you to touch it, to feel it, to experience it as a thing. And if you comment on, say, the weight of it, he nods. “Because it’s real materials,” he says proudly. Then he wants you to feel the connections, the magnets in the strap, the buckle, to witness the soft but solid snap, which he just loves as an interaction with design, a pure, tactile idea. “Isn’t that fantastic?”

The fact that Vogue, not Wired, scored this rare interview, and that Apple recently held a preview of the Apple Watch at fashion boutique Colette in Paris instead of its own Apple Stores, underscores how Apple is framing the Watch as a fashion accessory first, and tech gadget second. Read the whole profile over at Vogue.

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