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The Design Studio Behind The Iron Curtain

The Design Studio Behind the Iron Curtain

On February 9, 2001, after the hubbub of Macworld had died down, the industrial design studio was moved from the building on Valley Green Drive (across the road from Apple’s main campus) to a large space inside Apple’s HQ. The new design studio was put on the ground floor of Infinite Loop 2, known internally at Apple as IL2.

It was a big move logistically and symbolically. Bob Brunner had set up the original studio across the street to give it some independence from the rest of the company. Now Jony was being moved back right into the heart of Apple, allowing Jobs to work more closely with Jony and his team. It cemented the elevated status of design within the company. In Jony’s words: ID was now truly “close to the heartbeat of the company.”

It was a big move logistically, too. The studio is home to a lot of big machinery and prototyping equipment. In addition, everything in the new studio was custom made. “Every single thing in that space was custom made,” said Satzger. “Every piece of furniture, all the tables, the chairs, every piece of glass.”

The studio is a large space, occupying most of the ground floor of IL2. It’s recognizable from the outside only by the wall of large frosted windows across the bottom of the building. The windows are frosted to prevent anyone from getting a peek inside. Security is extremely tight.

The studio is divided into several different spaces. To the left of the entrance is a well-equipped kitchen with a large table. This is the heart of the studio where Jony’s team conducts their bi-weekly brainstorming sessions. To the right of the studio’s front entrance is a small conference room that is rarely used.

Opposite the front entrance is Jony’s office. It’s a glass cube, and the only private office in the studio. It measures about 12 by 12ft. The front wall and door are made of glass with stainless steel fittings, just like the ones in Apple’s stores. Except for a small shelf system, his office is bare with plain white walls. There are no pictures of his family or design awards, only a desk, chair and lamp. The desk is custom made by Marc Newsom, one of Jony’s best friends. His leather chair is a Supporto chair from the UK office furniture manufacturer Hille International. Designed in 1979 by the award-winning designer Fred Scott, the leather and aluminum chair is recognized as a design masterpiece. Jony has named it one of his favorite designs, and selected it for the new Industrial Design Centre in Cupertino, California. “The Supporto is a wonderful chair,” Jony told ICON magazine. The studio is filled with them: the designers all sit at Supporto desks and leather chairs.

His desk is usually bare except for his 17-inch MacBook and several colored pencils for drawing, which are typically arranged neatly on his desk. He doesn’t use an external monitor or any other peripheral equipment.

Directly outside Jony’s office are four large wooden project tables, which are used to present prototype products to executives. This was where Steve Jobs’ gravitated when he visited the studio, which had become almost daily. In fact, this is where Jobs got the idea for the big open tables in the Apple stores. Each table is dedicated to a different project — one for MacBooks, another for the iPad, the iPhone and so on. They are used to display models and prototypes of whatever Jony wanted to show Jobs and other executives. The models are covered at all times with a black cloth.

Next to Jony’s office and the presentation tables is a large computer-assisted design (CAD) room. It’s another glass cube, also fronted by a glass wall. The CAD room is home to about 15 CAD operators or “surface guys.” If the designers want to see what a CAD model looks like as a real object, they’ll send the file to the CNC model shop next door. Sometimes they output “scrap models,” which might be a detail, like the corner of a product or a button.

At the far end of the space is a machine room, or “the shop.” The shop is also fronted by a glass wall. It is divided internally into three rooms separated by more glass walls. To the front are three big computer numerical control (CNC) machines. These are big hulking milling machines, capable of crafting anything from metal to RenShape. They have covers that keep any scrap material contained; and so are “clean.” Behind them are the “dirty” machines — various cutting and drilling machines that can create a mess. They are housed in a room sealed behind glass — the “dirty shop.” Next to the dirty shop to the right is a finishing room where the models and prototypes are sanded and painted. It contains some fine sanding machines and a big paint spraying booth about the size of a car.

The shop is used by the design team to make models of upcoming products. The CNC machines are used to make initial models or to quickly validate ideas. “They’d get a CAD file for surfacing; they would create a tool path based on the surfaces, do all the setups, and run a part,” said Satzger. Oftentimes, Jony’s team makes hundreds of models; just like Jony did in college. As the product development process progresses, the design team will outsource model making to an outside specialist firm.

Jony’s office, the presentation tables, the CAD room and shop are all to the right of the front entrance. To the left there’s an opening by Jony’s office that leads to the space where the designers work. It’s a large open space lined by the long wall of outside frosted windows. The designers work on five large tables, subdivided by low dividers. The space is messy and chaotic. There are boxes, parts, samples, bikes and toys everywhere. The atmosphere is light and fun. “Someone might be skateboarding in there, doing jumps, or Bart Andre and Chris Stringer kicking a soccer ball,” said Satzger.

Music is an important part of the design studio’s fun atmosphere. There are about twenty white speakers in the room, with a pair of thirty-six-inch-high concert subwoofers. “When you walked into this concrete and steel, highly reflective room, the sound was immediately deep and loud,” Satzger said. “All kinds of music from around the world is played. It’s really lively.. We had so much music on that thing, you could pick anything.

Jony is a big fan of techno. The music drove Jony’s boss, Jon Rubinstein, to distraction. “They played loud techno-pop in the design studio, which I found really annoying,” he said. “I like quiet so that I can focus and think properly. But the ID guys liked it.”

“The energy of that room, the noise of the room made me work a lot better,” said Satzger. “I hated sitting back in my little space…. for me, the louder the noise the better.”

Jobs liked the music too. In fact, he would turn up the music when he visited. “When Steve came in, he wanted the conversation to be between him and the person he was talking to,” said Satzger. “In all these open spaces, if it’s quiet, it’s really easy to hear what people are talking about. When he came in, we would turn the music up so that his voice would carry directly to one person only. You really couldn’t hear what he was saying.”

The studio visibly relaxed Jobs. “Steve in the ID space was a different person. he was a lot more relaxed and interactive,” Satzger said. “Steve had moods all the time. There were always things that were changing in how he approached people. But when he came in the ID space, he was always really comfortable.

Steve spent a lot of time in the studio, but when he was away, Jony used it as an opportunity to get some work done. “When he went away, we would do 150–200% more work,” Satzger explained. “It was a good chance to blast stuff out and put new work, new ideas in front of him when he came back.”

The Iron Curtain:

When the design studio moved onto the main campus, Jobs significantly beefed up security to prevent leaks. The studio is Apple’s ideas factory: the heart of the operation. Nothing must leak out. When the studio was on Valley Green, security wasn’t as tight. Visitors would get buzzed in by whomever was around. Jobs was determined that wouldn’t be the case in the new studio.

The vast majority of Apple’s employees are barred from the company’s design lab. Even some members of the executive team are forbidden from entering the studio. Scott Forstall, for example, who rose to be head of iOS software, wasn’t allowed to visit and his badge wouldn’t open the door.

Very few outsiders have been inside the studio. Jobs would occasionally bring his wife in. Walter Isaacson was given a tour, but described only the presentation tables. The only known photograph of the studio was published in Time magazine. The photo shows Jobs, Jony and three other executives sitting and standing around one of the studio’s wooden project tables, with the shop in the background.

Jony occasionally gives interviews on Apple’s campus in an engineering workshop full of CNC milling machines. It’s been identified as the design studio, but it’s not. It’s an engineering workshop nearby.

When working on new products, the software engineers have no idea what the hardware looks like, and the engineers have no idea how the software works. When Jony’s team was making prototypes for the iPhone, they worked with a picture of the Home screen with dummy icons. But the most secretive department of all is Jony’s group. “It’s locked down,” said Satzger. “People know not to talk about their work and what was going on inside Apple to the wrong people.” The ‘wrong people’ is basically anyone but your direct colleagues, and sometimes not even them. Even Jony is forbidden from telling his wife what he’s working on.

A former Apple engineer who worked closely with Jony’s group in the Product Design team said the secrecy was exhausting. “Out of everything I’ve ever done in my life, I’ve never seen a more secret environment than working there,” he said. “We were constantly under threat of losing our jobs for revealing any shred of anything. And even within Apple, your neighbors often didn’t know what you were working on. … The secrecy was like a gun to your head. Make one false move and we’ll pull this trigger.”

Apple’s policy means that the designers have gotten almost no press, and very little public recognition. They’ve won every award under the sun and are known in design circles. But to the public, they are basically anonymous. There’s little resentment about the lack of credit. The team is used to it. Jony is pretty gracious. He gets all the awards and recognition, but he always talks about the team. As one wag noted, the only time Jony says “I” is when he’s talking about about the iPhone or iPad. “We took it as, we’re all getting credit,” said Satzger. “[Apple] always says, ‘the Apple design team,’ but Steve never wanted us to be in front of the camera. They blocked headhunters and search people. Because we were blocked from facing media and hidden from headhunters and so on, we called ourselves the ‘ID Team That’s Behind the Iron Curtain.’”

Jony and his group are the principal inventors at Apple. They conceive and create new products, refine existing ones, and do some fundamental R&D, though they are not the only R&D group in the company (There’s no separate R&D group). They investigate new materials and production processes. They constantly refine and improve Apple’s products and manufacturing processes. Stringer defines the role of an industrial designer at Apple as one “to imagine objects that don’t exist and to guide the process that brings them to life. And so that includes defining the experience that a customer has when they touch and feel our products. It’s managing the overall form and the materials, the textures, the colors. And it’s also working with engineering groups to, as I say, bring it to life, to bring it to the market and to building the craftsmanship that it absolutely needs to have to have that Apple quality.”

Jony’s iDG group is small, about 16 designers from around the world. They are extremely tight-knit, especially because many of them have worked there for decades.

By comparison, Samsung has 1,000 designers working in 34 research centers around the world. Of course, Samsung makes many more products than Apple, and even some of some of components of the iPhone and iPad.

It sounds pat, but Jony’s group works as a team and each member contributes to each product. Unlike when he joined the company, Jony no longer designs any of Apple’s products alone. Each product is designated a design lead, who does most of the actual work, plus one or two deputies, though weekly meetings ensure the design process is a collaboration.

Two or three times a week Jony’s entire team gathers around the kitchen table for brainstorming sessions. All of the designers must be present. No exceptions.

The brainstorms begin with coffee. A couple of the designers play barista, making coffee for the group from a high-end espresso maker in the kitchen. Daniele De Iuliis, the Italian from the UK, is the coffee guru. “Danny D was the person who educated us all on coffee and grind and the color of the crema, how to properly do the milk, how temperature is important and all that stuff,” said Satzger, who was one of his keenest disciples.

The brainstorms typically last for three hours — from 9am to noon, or 10 to 1 and are used to hash out whatever design problem Jony’s group is working on.

Jony runs the brainstorms, but he doesn’t dominate them. They are freewheeling, creative roundtables where everyone is expected to contribute. Jony rarely misses the brainstorm sessions unless he’s travelling. “Jony’s always been involved in every design session,” said one designer.

The brainstorms are very focused. Sometimes it’s a model presentation, sometimes the detail of a button or speaker grille. There is never discussion of design philosophy. Blogs and magazine articles often note the influence of Braun’s Dieter Rams on Jony’s products, but he never discusses design philosophy with the group. None of the designers and engineers interviewed for this book said Jony ever espoused a particular design philosophy. Of course, all the designers are intimately familiar with Rams’ work and his 10 principles of good design; it’s drummed into every design student. But each and every design is approached on its merits. If there’s such a thing as a philosophy that drives Jony, it’s the desire to constantly simplify; to do away with as much as possible.
“[We] discuss our objectives, and so we can just be talking about what we would want a product to be,” said Stringer. “That ordinarily becomes sketching, so we’ll sit there with our sketch books and sketch and trade ideas and go back and forth. That’s where the very hard, brutal, honest criticism comes in and we thrash through ideas until we really feel like we’re getting something that’s worth modeling.”

Sketching is fundamental to their workflow. “I end up sketching everywhere,” said Stringer. “I’ll sketch on looseleaf paper. I’ll sketch on models. I’ll sketch on anything I can put my hands on, quite often on top of CAD outputs for want of better things to do.” Stringer likes CAD printouts because they already have the shape of the product. “You’re working with something that already has the perspective set up and the views in a way that you can sort of add in lavish detail upon them,” he said.

Jony is also an inveterate sketcher. He is a good sketcher, but speed is the key. “He always wanted to get a thought down on paper so that people could understand it really quickly,” said Satzger. “Jony’s drawings were really sketchy, with a shaky hand. His drawing style was really interesting.”

Jony is skilled, but the artists of the group are Richard Howarth, Matt Rohrback and Chris Stringer. Satzger describes Howarth’s sketchbooks as ‘works of art.’ “Richard Howarth would come in saying he had a crap idea and ‘you guys are going to hate it’ but then shared these amazing sketches.” Jony’s sketchbooks also are “really cool.”

When the group was designing the iMac, the table was covered with loose sheets of copy paper for sketching on, but Jony’s group no uses hardbound sketchbooks. Most of the group use hardbound canvas sketchbooks from Cachet by Daler-Rowney, a small British company. The studio’s office supply stockroom is stacked with them. They are made from high quality canvas and hardbound, so they don’t fall to pieces. Jony uses a blue sketchbook that’s about three times as thick as the Cachet sketchbooks and has a ribbon to mark the page. Howarth uses the same sketchbook.

Jony’s group uses hardbound sketchbooks because it’s easy to go back and look at their ideas; They document everything — Ideos’ rule of keeping a record of everything generated during a brainstorm. The sketchbooks became a contentious issue at the Apple-Samsung trial..

A lot of sketching happens in these sessions. At the end of the brainstorm, Jony will sometimes instruct everyone around the table to copy their sketchbooks and give the pages to the lead designer on the project under discussion. Afterwards, Jony will sit with the lead designer and carefully go through all the pages. Most major projects have a lead and two deputies, who will also pore through the pages trying to find ways to integrate new ideas. “Some days I’d be engaged and have ten pages of stuff,” said Satzger. “Sometimes you could feel when a designer wasn’t engaged in the material, when they weren’t filling up pages of things.”

The most promising ideas are taken to the CAD group next door who will turn a sketch into a 3D model. The model is then sent to the machine shop, where it creates a “tool path” for one of the CNC milling machines to cut the shape into RenShape or ABS to validate the basic size and shape. A “tool path” is at it sounds – a path determined by the computer that the cutting tool follows to create the desired shape.

Although they make up about half the staff in the studio, there’s a clear division between the CAD operators and the designers. The CAD sculptors are not afforded the same special status; they are in service of Jony’s design team. “There are a few designers that are capable of creating CAD themselves, but it’s not a requirement,” said Stringer during the Apple-Samsung trial. “In fact, most of us don’t. It’s a skill you need to dedicate significant time to just to understand the craft of CAD. We prefer our designers to be thinking, so we have a dedicated team for this.”

The CAD group comprise a separate group, and they keep to themselves. They rarely attend meetings and are kept in the dark (metaphorically and literally: the CAD studio is has very low lighting).

Models

When the group is ready to present ideas to Jobs or another executive, they outsource to a model shop that specializes in making realistic mockups. They want the models to look as much as possible like a final, finished product, and that requires specialist equipment and skills. Jony’s group frequently uses Fancy Model Company, a highly-respected model-making company based in Fremont run by Ching Yu, a modelmaker from Hong Kong. Most of the iPhone and iPad prototypes were made by Fancy Model Co. Each model costs around $10,000 to $20,000. “Apple spent millions on models made by that company,” said a former designer.

By contrast, the CNC machines at Apple, although capable of making pretty refined models, are used mainly for parts that are needed quickly — a lot of plastic shapes and smaller aluminum bits. The Apple CNC machines are rarely used to produce final models.

When it comes to choosing the right design, the finished models play a crucial role. For example, when designing the Mac Mini, Jony had about a dozen models made up of diferent sizes. The Mac mini is Apple’s “headless” Mac: a small aluminum box that comes without a monitor or keyboard and mouse; customers supply their own. It’s a relatively inexpensive product and at many companies would be low on the totem pole.

Jony had about a dozen models made up, ranging from very large to very small. He had the models lined up on one of the presentation tables in the studio. “We were there with some of the VPs and Jony,” said the former Product Design engineer. “They pointed at the smallest one and they said, well, obviously that is too small, that kinda looks ridiculous. Then they pointed at the other side and said, well, that’s too large, no one wants a computer that big. How do you find what’s right in the middle? And they talked through that process.”

The decision about the size of the case seems faintly ridiculaous, but it would influence what kind of hard drive the Mini could contain. If the case was large enough, the computer could be given a 3.5-inch drive, which are commonly used in desktop machines and are relatively inexpensive. If Jony chose a small case, it would have to use a 2.5-inch laptop drive, which is much more expensive.

Jony and the VPs selected an enclosure that was just 2mm too small to use a less expensive 3.5-inch drive. “They pick it based on what it looks like, not on the hard drive, which will save money,” the engineer said. He said he didn’t even bring up the issue of the hard drive; it wouldn’t have made a difference. “Even if we provided that feedback, it’s rare they would change the original intent,” he said. “They went with purely aesthetic form of what it should look like and how big it should be.”

Size considerations even influence things like the camera on the iMac. The iMac has a front-facing camera above the screen that is used for videoconferencing.
Another Apple engineer, who also asked to remain anonymous, worked with Jony’s team on adding a camera to the iMac. “The biggest challenge was how small Steve Jobs and the ID group wanted the opening for the camera to be,” he said. “The size of the opening had to be as small as possible for aesthetic reasons, which should come as no surprise. I have little doubt that if the opening could have been made invisible, it would have been.”

The design process is not linear. On a fundamental level it starts with a brainstorm and sketching, leading to finished models that show the form and finish of a proposed product; but the process is extremely fluid. Products are often explored in several parallel directions; they are restarted or scrapped. “These processes, though they seem very linear, and in instances can be, typically aren’t because we’ll go back and forth,” said Stringer. “We’ll even sketch on models. We’ll combine a part model and a sketch from another sketch book from a different design session. It’s back and forth. It’s non-linear. It weaves and knits its way along the design process, ultimately to a point where we feel really satisfied that we have something special.”

Jony’s Role

In recent years Jony’s role has become more managerial than design driven. Jony doesn’t design any of the products alone, but he adjudicates every single design decision the group makes. Nothing is done without his input, whether it’s the color of a product or the detail of a button. “Everything is reviewed by Jony,” said one of the designers. Jony runs the group and recruits new members. He is the conduit of information between the design group and the rest of the company, especially at the executive level. He worked very closely with Steve Jobs when he was alive and now with Apple’s executives to select what products to work on and what directions they should take.

“Every design idea goes through Jony,” said Satzger. “An early methodological failure used to be that there were lots of good designers at Apple, who were all allowed to work on different things simultaneously. There was no control over these people. Later, Jony became involved in every design session, and the team took everything he said very seriously.”

“Jony is very effective as a leader. He is a soft-spoken English gentlemen who had Jobs’s ear. He never managed people like he was the boss. He was pretty neutral. And he treated everyone’s opinion as important. He would sit down with people and begin with, ‘Steve’s not happy with where we are. We need to start building models and come up with new ideas. We need to do something different.’ Then for the next week every day the team would have all-morning design sessions.”

In many ways, Jony was the hand implementing Jobs’s vision. If Jobs didn’t like something, he’d say so, but that was the only direction he gave. He pushed Jony and his designers to come up with the right solution.

On many occasions, Jony managed up. “A lot of times, it was Jony who would drive Steve,” said Satzger. “He might say to Steve, ‘I think we should change this,’ if he felt that it was important to do something different.’”

“Jony’s team in the design studio comprised a great group of people,” said Rubinstein. “They were obviously having fun doing really cool designs. They were a small, really close-knit team that works really well together. Jony is a great leader at driving the team.

“Jony is a good leader. He is a brilliant designer, and his team respect him. Jony has very good product sense. And when he is immersed in the design process, his work is a collaborative effort. Although in the press Jony gets all the credit, in reality his whole team does a lot of work. They are a talented team that does brilliant work together. They all contribute tremendously with great ideas.

“It is very iterative process. It is lots and lots of different designs, lots of different directions. We as a team would get together: Me and Steve and Phil and Jony would get together and go through the designs and Jony’s team would evolve a direction. And we’d do that again and again until we finalized what it was going to look like.

“As a personality, Jony Ive is low-key. He hides the ego behind that. He can be a very intense guy. Sometimes he can be very intense. He is soft spoken, but also very firm in his beliefs. He jokes occasionally, but mainly has a serious comportment. He was always very focused on his career, and aware of the politics to move up within the company. The public persona of Jony Ive stating that all that matters to him at Apple is design — is nonsense. He was very focused on his career.”

Jony’s group is extremely tight. Insular isn’t the word. They work together, eat together and socialize together. Every day, four to eight of the designers go to lunch together, usually at the cafeteria. They generally don’t mingle with other Apple staff; they eat at their own table.

The designers socialize together after work, especially those living in San Francisco. For many of the designers, social life and work are one. That includes Jony. “If I did something, unless my wife arranged it, it was with them all,” said Satzger. “The SF group was a lot more tight. Bart, Chris, and me hung out. Danny and Jony and Richard and Matt got together all the time and saw Eugene. Duncan was more independent. They liked drinking a lot of champagne and spent a lot of time at Le Colonial.” Le Colonial is a stylish French Vietnamese restaurant in San Francisco.

“At MacWorld we’d get a limo and go. The limo was full of Bollinger champagne. We’d drink and go to dinner somewhere, then end up in the Redwood Room [a cocktail bar in San Francisco’s Clift Hotel] and drink some more. We’d reserve it whenever Jony’s friend Marc Newson was in town. Then we’d end up at the Clift Hotel and Bart or Jony would rent a room and the design team, and maybe a couple other people, were always there.”

The former Product Design engineer remembers being at a black-tie event at the Clift Hotel. “Around midnight in rolls the ID crew for the after party that is going on in the hotel lobby,” the engineer said. “Stringer, Ive, Whang, and a bunch more were there. I’m asking Ive, ‘what are you doing here?’ They just roll out at night and do select exclusive bar hopping. They had a reserved area. They’re always very trendy, into trendy music.”

Many of Jony’s team have kids. Even though the design studio is off limits to outsiders, the designers frequently bring their kids in.

Satzger brought his kids into the studio all the time. His daughter is interested in pursuing a design career. She wrote a college essay about growing up in the Apple ID studio, about process and how things were built and why. “She was part of the group, she could found be there for 8-10 hours. Everyone brought their kids in.”

Except Jony. Jony always kept his wife twin sons Charlie and Harry pretty secret. Some of the designers who live in San Francisco know his family, but to the others they are a mystery. It’s an odd exception for a man who’s father had such a strong influence on his son’s interest in design.