I remember the first time I saw an Apple product.
I remember it so clearly because it was the first time I realized,when I saw this product.
I got a very clear sense of the people who designed it and made it.
A big definition of who you are as a designer is the way you look at the world.
And I guess it's one of the curses of what you do,
you're constantly looking at something and thinking.
why is it like that? Why is it like that and not like this?
And so in that sense, you're constantly designing.
When we're designing a product, we have to look to different attributes of the product,
that's connected to those materials .So for example with the first iMac that we made,
私は初めてApple製品を見た時のことを覚えている。
その製品を見た時、それを作ったのが初めてだったためにその印象を鮮明に覚えている。
私は製品をデザインし作った人々の非常に明確な考えを理解した。
デザイナーとしてのあなたがどういうものであるかの大きな定義があなたの世界の見方だ。
おそらくそれはあなたの仕事の呪いの１つだろう。
あなたは常に何かを見て考えている。
どうしてそんな風なのか、こんな風ではなくてあんな風なのか、と。
そういう意味で、あなたは常にデザインしていると言える。
私達が１つの製品をデザインする時、材料に関連した製品の違った特性に目を向けなければならない。そこで例えば私達が最初に作ったiMacを例に挙げると、
the primary component of that was the cathode ray tube, which was spherical.
We would have an entirely different approach to designing something like that, than the current iMac,which is a very thin flat-panel display.
Other issues would be,just physically how do you connect to the product, so for example with something like the iPhone everything defers to the display.
A lot of what we seem to be doing in a product like that is getting design out of the way.
And I think when forms develop with that sort of reason,and they're not just arbitrary shapes,
it feels almost inevitable,it feels almost un-designed.
It feels almost like, well of course it's that way, why wouldn't it be any other way.
製品の主成分は球状のブラウン管だった。
そのような製品をデザインするには、現在の非常に薄いフラットパネルディスプレーのiMacとは全く違ったアプローチをしただろう。
別の問題は、単にあなたが物理的にその製品とどうつながっているかという問題だ。そこで、iPhoneのようなデバイスだと表示の方法は全て違っている。
１つの製品で私達がしようとしているように見えることの多くは、並外れたデザインを手に入れることだ。
そしてそのような理由で形状が創り上げられていく時、それは偶然の形状ではないと私は思う。
それはほとんどデザインされていないと感じられるような、それでなければならないデザインだと感じられるもの、
他のどんなデザインでもダメで、当然そのようにデザインされるべきだと感じさせてくれるものだ。
This is the bezel for the iMac. When we remove the aluminum for the display in the center,
we actually take that material and then we can make two keyboard frames from it.
These are literally just a couple of the stages of how you make the Macbook Air.
Rough cutting… this is for the keyboard well.
And there is just a remarkable efficiency and beauty to the how much a single part can do,and one of things we push and push ourselves on is trying to figure out, can we do the job of those six parts with just one.
This part actually starts off as this extraction, this is an aluminum extraction that goes through multiple operations, most of them CNC machined operations, to end up…
to end up with this part, And you can see, just a dramatic transformation between this raw blank and the final part.
But what we end up with is a part that's got all of the mounting features, all of the bosses… this is just one part,
but this one part is providing so much functionally.
And this one part really does enable this product.
So much of the effort behind a product like the Macbook Air was experimenting with different processes.
There's a… it's completely non-obvious,but the way that you hold… to get from this part, to this part…
there's an incredibly complex series of fixtures to hold this part in the different machine stages.
And we end up spending a lot of time designing fixtures.
The design of this in many ways wasn't the design of a physical thing,it was figuring out process.
It's really important in a product to have a sense of a hierarchy of what's important and what's not important, by removing those things that are all vying for your attention.
An indicator has a value when it's indicating something.
But if it's not indicating something ,it shouldn't be there.
It's one of those funny things, you spend so much time to make it less conspicuous and less obvious.
And if you think about it so many of the products that we're surrounded by, they want you to be very aware of just how clever the solution was.
When the indicator comes on, I wouldn't expect anybody to point to that as a feature, but a some level I think you're aaare of a calm and considered soultion,that therefore speaks about how you're going to use it, not the terrible strungles that we as designers and engineers had in trying to solve some of the problems.
That's quite obsessive, isn't it?
