Week_1

=** Tutorial Question #1 ** = ===** Describe Jonathan Ive and his theory of "undesign" in relation to his work at Macintosh. ** ===

Jonathan Ive is an English designer and also the Senior Vice President of Industrial Design at Apple Inc.

His theory of "undesign" means creating and understanding a hierarchy of things that are not important by removing those things that are all vying for your attention. "Undesign" consists of getting design out of the way. It's about thinking, "Of course it's that way, why would it be any other way?" Other companies want you to be aware of how clever the solution to the problem is. Ive doesn't want consumers to think about what engineers and designers have gone through in order to come up with a particular design for a product.

If you look at an Apple product, the features it offers cannot be seen by just looking at the product. The design is plain, but effective. On an aluminum Macbook, the indicator light on the side of the computer is only visible when it is indicating it is in sleep mode, otherwise, it is not visible. There are no useless features on the outside of the computer that make a consumer think, "What does this do?" Simple, power button, keyboard, camera, and trackpad. Each button on the keyboard is self-explanatory, volume up, down, mute, etc. The necessities are given, and the result is exactly what Ive said, the consumer thinks, "Of course it's that way, why would it be any other way?"