Core77

How Steve Jobs Ruined My Life

By Raymond Jepson - October 21, 2011

in Design Business

I truly hope that Steve Jobs is in heaven. In many ways, he certainly deserves it. For tech fans, I don't think anyone has brought more joy to the world than Mr. Jobs and his Apple Computer colleagues. However, he ruined my life. I'm an industrial designer who has been working since 2002. For people who measure time by Apple products, that's right when the 2nd generation iPod was launched. As a designer, you might think that I would be inspired by Apple. Maybe even in awe of their awesome design might. I am, but they've also made my job so much harder. Unfortunately, I don't mean in terms of raising the standard of design. Talk to any design consultant in the world and they will all have a story about the client(s) who walked in the door and said, "I want to make the iPod/iPhone/iPad of my industry." The first time they heard this, their eyes widened. Their pulse quickened. Finally, could clients have come to realize how industrial design adds real value to their products? Could 100 years of design history finally lead to this? Would we actually be left to concentrate on the core design abilities, like creativity and form development instead of fighting clients to let us actually give their customers what they wanted? "Yeah, I want my widget just like an iPod. Well, in plastic because we have six injection presses in the factory. Oh, and the finish has to be matte, because we don't have time to adjust the mold to eject quality glossy parts. Oh, and we need huge draft on the parts and huge part lines, because, again, we don't have time or budget to work out high tolerances. Other than that though, just like an iPod." So, no, the design world didn't change. A new golden age didn't begin. In fact, I think it was retarded. Remember the gay ’90s? When Rubbermaid was on the cover of Business Week as an example of a brave American company letting designers find new market opportunities? When a struggling Iomega company listened to designers to create the Zip drive? Herman-Miller had the guts to launch the radical Aeron chair? Business has really started to listen to designers. Then Steve Jobs returned to Apple.All of a sudden, business stopped listening. Now they "understood." They didn't need to pay designers to do research into what people wanted. People wanted Apple. Initially, that meant that people wanted translucent plastic. After Apple moved on to chrome and glass, that meant people wanted boxes, but molded in plastic because business needed to amortize the cost of their tooling. After that initial misunderstanding, I hoped that for the sake of good design, Jobs would say something. A sermon on design from a balcony, a letter to the Wall Street Journal, even a tweet. Anything to straighten out these confused businessmen. The genius of Jobs and Apple wasn't the product. It was the vision, the process and the people. The vision was his ability to step back from the semiconductors and programming code and see their value from the point of view of a user. They don't care about features or amortizing your tooling costs. They care about what the product does for them. In some cases, like the iPod, the product did less than the competition (iPods never had radios, while all of their competitors did). In all cases, they were willing to drastically changed tooling if it would give the user a device that felt higher quality. The process and the people go together. Steve Jobs was not a designer, or a good programmer. He was good and finding them, inspiring them and giving them the tools to succeed. He did it with Wozniak on the Apple II. The Mac programmers in '83, when he insisted that command line computing was dead. And again when he made Jonathan Ive the head of design. The exact process they used is a secret, although we can have some educated guesses. For example, the Apple Mac Book Air was followed by many other similar computers (Intel Core2 Duo processor, flash memory hard drive & designed to be thin) in just a few months. Anyone familiar with product development will understand that they weren't copies, they were developed in parallel to the MacBook Air, but the Air got out first. That leads me to believe there was a ruthless phase-gate process where the design gets frozen very early to allow the whole development team to focus on delivering a product rather than argue over specifications. I can only hope that in the long awaited Steve Jobs biography, it will all be explained. Perhaps Mr. Jobs will revolutionize design from the grave in the way he revolutionized computing while alive. I can only pray.

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Brian Seymour

13 years ago

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Grow a backbone and push back with your clients. Jeez.
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jeff

13 years ago

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So glad there is followup to the contrary of the writer's view.

How much for a glass of that WHINE.

If you have virtually unlimited resources, you design and execute accordingly.

If you have limits, YOU DESIGN ACCORDINGLY.

If your clients don't understand what unlimited vs. limited is, you have failed grossly with typical yes-man pandering.

Either find a better place to work, or train your sales people to not oversell what you can't do.

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LEO

13 years ago

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Tell your clients:

Steve trusted Jony and the ID team, Apple ID team is
the very core of where the vision is developed. Meaning
that Apple utilizes design far beyond a styling mechanism.
The trick is not get designers into your boardroom, but turn your boardroom into a design studio.
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Tom

13 years ago

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Apple ID is just a part of a cohesive eco-system, that's the real magic of their products. They proved people are willing to pay for a great user experience, not to mention quality product designs.
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Ray Jepson

13 years ago

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Let's get the important things out of the way first:

Star Trek was better than Star Wars. Dune was too. I use Dune and Star Trek to rate sci-fi movies. Better industrial design in both too. Star Trek the Next Generation had iPod 1,238s everywhere on the ship. Those Stillsuits in Dune had that air of haut couture meets utility. Very difficult balance to find.

I'm glad to see so many people feeling similar to the Apple part of my article. The haters even got it. Good design process needs to be promoted. Part of that means calling out the leaders when they make horrible decisions (round mice?). Part of that means pointing out the unlikely successes (Harmony remotes). The last part means separating the process from the result. It still amazes me that everyone knows that 95% of new products fail at launch, but organizations stick to the same process. When I was a kid, I always thought adults would be smarter than this.

As for the haters, I agree with you all. However, why should we accept the need to convince clients to do projects the right way? It should be a no-brainer for any manager to implement a winning process.
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Ben

13 years ago

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Don't forget most ID's are part of smaller practices, working on smaller projects where budgets are tight and the decisions over style and finish are usually constricted by unit price and tooling cost.

If you feel strongly that a 'design' would look/feel/perform better with added thought, innovation and extra tooling costs as a result, make DAMN sure you back it up with substance, a concise thought process and professionalism.

'Because it just does' is not a valid response.

If you can't be bothered to put the extra time in to do this (usually in your own time) then its a case of put up and shut up.

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Marlon Bishop

13 years ago

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I would say only 20% of the success comes from good design, the majority come from keen business talents in things like timing, marketing, product and manufacturing. Seamless part lines and draft don't amount to much if you can't make the right deals and get your product out before the competition knows what hit them. It was all about timing, not design
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Ben

13 years ago

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Hey guys,

I dunno Raymond in person but instead of flaming pull out your dictionary and flip over to the page where "IRONY" is explained, then come back an read this article again! ^^

Rest peacefully in iHeaven iGod! ;)
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Keith F

13 years ago

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Do none of the commenters understand the concept of sarcasm?
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c3

13 years ago

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the Finger as interface pointer-- Jobs obsession- is just wrong... in most instances its got no support from the wrist. and is too bulky.. which is why some "other" genius monkey picked up and used the first stick.,.;) for a ATM or short time factor device-fine.. but carpal tunnel for the finger hasne yet begun to show its health care costs;) good luck broke designers...after spending all you bucks on upgrade this and that...

and as one of the "first industrial designers" to use and seminar about the mac and visualization in NYC... Jobs didnt ruin ID... ID'rs did;) as a whole the profession was too late to realize that "computer" meant "medium" not "tool" and that "industrial" was last century...19th.;) true- with a holdover till about 1960:) then TV virtualized us all and it hasnt stopped since.:)

between apple, adobe and autodesk (western) designers have sold their "value " to 3 large corporations that by nature set up machine scale expectations from all...

Many young designers have traded Jobs for jobs... For a generation that thinks in the myth of the collective, thats a strange stand out. A delusion or a hope?... time will tell.

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Maximo Cozzetti

13 years ago

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I disagree quite much on Steve Job's being the one who ruined your career. I'm a graphic and web designer and where I live many people don't know Apple, they just know the iPod or iPhone. Still, clients have those ridiculous demands that you mention. Business clients are almost always jerks with lack of vision, trying to reduce costs, not really caring about design and very often trying to copy some else... this isn't Jobs' fault, it's a much social deep problem.
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Scott Jenson

13 years ago

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Raymond, I loved your post. Spot on.

Those criticizing this post by claiming you just aren't 'educating' your clients properly clearly don't have many clients... It's not that you can't educate them, it's that you have to educate them so much, so often, and so forcefully.

Your deep down key point is that many clients really don't want to hear what it takes to truly innovate. They confuse copying with innovating..
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Rob

13 years ago

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Radio on ipod. Such a compelling feature that I had completely forgotten about it, though I do now listen to radio on my phone via Internet.
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Frank

13 years ago

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MEP says its perfectly - there will always be idiots, you have to educate them or live with them, not whine about it. Apple products have raised the profile of excellent industrial design, you should be having a heyday.
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M4RK

13 years ago

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Its your job as the designer to explain these concerns to the client, not just nod and say ok. Express how they need to think "what would apple do" and not " what do they have". But if anyone should raise these issues, it should be you. Clients have other things to worry about too.
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Mikil

13 years ago

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Oh then as per this article
George Lucas the creator of Star Wars' destroyed many lives of science-fiction movie makers ...ha ha ha
Cause after Star Wars every audience relates any new sci-fi movie with Star Wars ;)))
so next Article from a concept designer will be 'How George Lucas Ruined My Life'
i think we all will have similar entertainment in that too:))))
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Rx

13 years ago

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Well, as a designer, you should look at issues from a multi-faceted perspective but you kinda miss that. It's true that s**t happens, but we as designers find ways out of it. In my perspective, Steve Jobs just changed how the industry works and you can't seem to embrace change that well.
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Paolo

13 years ago

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iPods had radios at least since the third generation! You need the Apple earplugs w/ remote. The one that plugs in the proprietary port on the bottom. It makes Radio appear in the options, and uses the cable as the antenna :)

Nice article!
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Micah

13 years ago

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Wow. So much fail, I don't know where to begin.

You seriously need to communicate with your clients better. You should listen to Mike Monteiro's fantastic Let's Make Mistake podcast and learn about a few methods wimpy introverted designers need to start practicing.

What a crock of shit this blog is.
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Darwin

13 years ago

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What an idiotic article.
Oh and BTW the Air hasn't been followed by anyone yet.
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David Martinez

13 years ago

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There was little link bait in that title, I'm still not sure how he destroyed your life.
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dnguyen

13 years ago

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Ummm... Did everyone forget about Jonathan Ive?
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MEP

13 years ago

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http://www.marco.org/2011/10/20/how-to-bring-good-design-to-a-platform

Read the above link, then come back (it's a list of five things, each a sentence long, you can handle it). Did you read it? Good.

There will always be clients and stakeholders who think design is about making things look pretty. Steve Jobs has nothing to do with this. Before him it was something else they wanted to copy. There are designers who think this way too, and there always have been.

What's funny is that there are dozens of interviews with Jobs where he outlines exactly what Apple did right and everyone else did wrong. He said it over and over again, publicly, sometimes very publicly. You're clients didn't hear it because they didn't care and if you wanted to learn how to explain it to them you could've just listened to Jobs a little more closely because he laid for you out frequently.

Steve Jobs didn't ruin your life. You just don't know how to educate your stakeholders. And yes, that is part of your job. It was part of Jobs' job and part of Ives' job and they pulled it off. That's part of a being a designer. Expressing your process and goals so that people know you've done something for them is as much a part of your job as drawing the sketches.

If you can't justify to your clients/stakeholders what you think is best then you're a failure on your own merits (or lack thereof). Blaming the guy who COULD communicate effectively to his stakeholders (shareholders, board of directors, etc.) is just whining at best. Every designer has had the same experience you've had. Some have succeeded, others not. Who's to blame?
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dean kakridas

13 years ago

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I get the picture and many of your points are valid, but don't you think saying "Steve Jobs ruined your life" is a bit excessive and dramatic? Does your life's fortunes really rest so explicitly on what one tech company or one tech leader wishes for their products in the marketplace? If so, you may want to consider a change of career.
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Notpit

13 years ago

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I get what you're trying to say, but I think you've placed blame in the wrong place. Steve Jobs and Apple didn't set out to change the world of design. They set out to change the way people interacted with technology, and strong industrial design was a huge part of that. Just because "business" got lazy and tried to ride Apple's coattails doesn't mean that Steve Jobs failed you in some way, nor did he "ruin your life". It just means you have to work harder to move your clients in the right direction. To educate them as to why Apple succeeded. If your clients don't listen to you, then maybe you're not doing your job well enough. Or maybe your clients are just too stubborn. Whatever the reason is, Steve Jobs isn't to blame here.
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Andrew C

13 years ago

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I couldn't agree more! Steve Jobs' legacy is that of picking the right people to the do the right job and inspiring them to do great things. Apple's success due to Jobs is clear.

Many people see the success of Apple as a direct result of, aside from Jobs, product styling. While there is nothing wrong with that style - and it is in many contexts elegant in its simplicity - the conclusion that everything should look like an iPod to guarantee a successful line of products is a false correlation. People easily seem to forget that many Apple products have impeccable user experiences associated with them, that stem from robust functionality and simple, straightforward interfaces. What people fail to realize is that, if anything, Apple products are designed to supplement that user experience by fading into the background, so that the user gets closer to interacting with the object's function rather than the object itself.

Simply applying Apple's aesthetic choices to a product doesn't automatically qualify it as a "good" product. The product runs the added risk of never getting out of Apple's shadow; the user's expectations for your product become those for Apple's products. When trying to vie for space in a market, the product not only has to compete against other products in its own category, but against Apple as well.

Sincerely, thank you Steve Jobs and thank you Dieter Rams
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md111

13 years ago

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I tend to agree being an industrial designer myself. I'm surprised nothing is ever mentioned on how ergonomically poor the ipad is. After 20 minutes my hand starts to cramp up. Human factors is also an industrial design trait. Sure make it thinner and bevel the edges, and it does look great, doesn't seem to make it better to hold.
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James D

13 years ago

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A similar thing happened in software UI, with it being impossible from 2004-2009 for some VP or C-level wanting your enterprise search engine, foreign exchange tool or network printer management interface to look like iTunes.

I also agree, too many people are putting too much importance on Jobs being an "innovator" or a "creative genius" when his best work was all in finding people who can execute, understanding user experience and having high standards of quality.
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