Let’s pretend, for a moment, that you live under a rock. Or perhaps you are a particularly happy person in a particularly remote portion of Borneo. If that is the case, then you probably don’t know that a fellow by the name of Steve Jobs has died. Otherwise, you would know.
Because of that (knowing), and because my interactions with Borneo Rock Dwellers are limited, I didn’t see a reason to write anything about it. He was dead, you knew that, and chances are all the topics would be covered five or six times over.
As it stands, I feel there’s a topic that hasn’t been covered.
This thought was inspired by reading an article by Maria Bustillos over on The Awl titled ‘Less Human than Human: The Design Philosophy of Apple.’ Ms. Bustillos’s point seems to be that Apple’s design aesthetic – and by extension, that of Jobs – isn’t human. It’s impersonal, it’s cold, it lacks good human values. This dovetails into other things that frequently start to crop up whenever people talk about Apple’s former CEO: Apple is trying control us, the machines are our enemies, there is no soul in this technology, and the only thing of value that Apple has brought to our lives is, well, nothing. They make expensive crap that has turned us all into zombies. Zombies, man! Zombies that don’t even like brains, but just shiny things! And oh, Steve Jobs was a jerk! And didn’t give money to charity! And I’m a unique flower who doesn’t buy into the hype!
On a personal level, I feel that there are so many logical inconsistencies in the article that my toes start to curl just reading it, but I found myself wondering why I cared. After all, people aren’t logical all the time and you don’t see me walking around with curled toes. I disagree with most of the human race on one topic or another, and don’t feel compelled to write anything about it. What was the difference?
Being misunderstood, cliche though it may be, is a trigger point for most of us. When someone starts saying things about us that just aren’t true, that, then, is what gets our goat. I don’t mind that you disagree, it’s that you are making up the topic of disagreement!
So, before I can start frothing at the article in question, it might be helpful to explain a few things about those of us who do like Steve Jobs, to clear up misunderstanding. Why do I care? And not just I, but a great many people in the same position as me; people working in the technology field, passionate about technology? At the end of the day, the reason is really simple:
We agreed with him.
He was the person on the planet who said the things we believed, who articulated our, my, passions so precisely and, most surprisingly, brought them to life. It’s not that I walk around going, ‘Wow, thanks Mr. Jobs for teaching me the truth, the light and the way.’ It’s that I walk around saying, ‘Hey, if you want a really good example of what I’m talking about, check out what the dude in the black turtleneck was saying.’ This is not a strange thing, we do this all the time, on countless topics, every day. We refer to other people as examples, either in speech or action. Steve Jobs just happened to embody both those things, and he did so with a keen passion. This is a passion that I often, on a day to day basis, feel embarrassed to even acknowledge. I remember once, years ago, having a conversation with a close friend in the same field as I, and laughingly observing that I was crazy enough to actually think that the work I got to be part of could change the world. When he quietly noted he thought the same thing I remember a lightbulb going off in my head – so many of us feel that, but don’t quite know what to do with it.
And what, exactly, are we passionate about? Well, technology, sure. But it’s a bit more specific than that. It’s the deep belief that computers matter.
Putting words into italics doesn’t really make them matter more, and to a certain degree, the statement is laughable. But then, saying water matters or food matters is ludicrously simple as well, but we all know that hey, indeed, they do matter, and if we don’t treat them like they don’t, things get hairy. And truth be told, I feel that all too often, we don’t realize just how much computers matter in our world today.
No, I’m not going to start preaching about computers running every system you interact with, blah blah blah. That just makes one want to retreat to a rock in Borneo, and I get that. But consider for a moment: no one is going to argue that life matters (I didn’t even feel I had to italicize that) – unless you’re some whackjob, you probably agree. And there are any number of life saving procedures in modern medicine today that would simply be impossible if it weren’t for computers. They provide us with an absurd amount of power.
But hey, that line of thought is also not uncommon; I’m just using it to drill down to this one: personal computing matters. Why? Because humanity is literally and figuratively sitting on an atom bomb of technology, grabbing the tiger by the tail and the only hope we have of making it not explode in our faces is ensuring that computers serve us, not we them. That’s a cute line that is used everywhere, all the time – including the article I’ve linked to – without any understanding of the implication of that statement; the only way computers will serve ‘us’ is if anybody can use one. And as it stands right now, that sure as shoot isn’t the case. People feel entrapped by their technology.
In short, technology needs to be human.
“Well, let’s say you can shave 10 seconds off of the boot time. Multiply that by five million users and thats 50 million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that’s probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you’ve saved a dozen lives. That’s really worth it, don’t you think?” – Steve Jobs, working on the original Macintosh (via Folklore.org)
Steve Jobs was obsessed with creating products that were human, that fulfilled their functions beautifully and efficiently. With making a product that we could all pick up and use. The result of such a thought process is that human should be simple.
“I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. Humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list….That didn’t look so good, but then someone at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle and a man on a bicycle blew the condor away.
“That’s what a computer is to me: the computer is the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with. It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.” – Steve Jobs
You know what I feel when I read those words?: ‘Yes! Somebody else gets it!’ I don’t think, ‘Gee, that’s so profound, I’ve never thought of that before.’ These thoughts exist in me, because of my beliefs, ideas, and passions. And I am not alone.
Currently, we are a planet of bicycles careening this way and that, with people riding backwards, on training wheels, or not at all, simply holding their bicycle and walking along beside it. I’m passionate that bicycles are great, and everyone should be able to ride one. Steve was too. He was obsessed not with computing, but with personal computing. Not with technology, but tools for every human being.
That I believe this work is vital, altering history in ways we cannot begin to fathom, I am not alone in that either. And so I, and people like me, care.
So what does this have to do with an article discussing the design aspects of Apple products?
Ms Bastillos writes: “Steve Jobs was, in short, too much a plutocrat and too little a craftsman to produce an ultimately satisfying appropriation of the warmer, more humane minimalism of the mid-20th century, which was rooted in a vision of a more egalitarian, fairer world. To what degree do ‘good design,’ or ‘taste,’ depend on human values?”
I would respond with this:
“People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” – Steve Jobs
If you seriously believe something is important, you care about it. And if you truly care about something, you can’t care about a part of it and forget the rest. If you do, the rest will suffer, and if there is any inter-dependence between the two, everything will suffer.
The disconnect for people like Maria Bustillos is that they haven’t stopped to consider that perhaps the design is in no way separate from the function of the machine, a function that is almost entirely virtual, represented on a screen. In that case, what function does the design really serve?
“Steve encouraged the Mac designers to think of ourselves as artists. In the spring of 1982, he took the entire Mac team on a field trip to a Louis Comfort Tiffany exhibition in San Francisco, because Tiffany was an artist who was able to mass produce his work, as we aspired to do. Steve even had us individually sign the interior of the Macintosh case, like artists signing their work (see Signing Party), encouraging each one of us to feel personally responsible for the quality of the product.” – Andy Hertzfield (Folklore.org)
The answer for Steve Jobs was fairly simple – as it should have been for a man who espoused simplicity. The design is there to emphasize the user interaction with the OS, to serve as backdrop, not as a centerpiece. The stores, the case, and increasingly the OS itself are all designed to provide focus on what the user is doing. Unlike many other tools, where what you hold is the function, with most of Apple’s products what you hold is the frame, the gateway to the function itself. In other words, the beauty of the design should stem from how little of it there is. Naturally, this extends to the OS itself – functions that are serve as gateways to the primary experience have been increasingly de-emphasized by Apple to focus on the content; hence the smoother backdrop of the Finder in Lion, compared to significantly brighter visuals in applications users interact with most often – iCal, Addressbook, Mail, etcetera (this is not by any means meant to condone the atrocity that is iCal in Lion). The point here is though, that the actual user experience is meant to be inviting, friendly, in contrast to the frame of the case, the packaging, the store, and so on which are minimalist in the extreme. One only needs to look at Steve Jobs house to immediately see how differently he perceived living space versus commercial space. These differences are not there as a mistake, but as purposeful and conscious design choices.
What’s important to distinguish is that Jobs isn’t the creator of these concepts, but he believed in them, and acted on them. That he may not have succeeded by the estimates of some is a matter of opinion, and it matters little to me which way your opinion sways. But what is irrefutable is that he tried constantly, believed with an intense passion that it was the right thing, that it was a moral question. A lot has been made of Jobs not partaking much in social causes, but what is missed is that he firmly believed what he was doing was a social cause.
None of this is to imply that he was a wonderful human being. He may or may not have been. I didn’t know him. None of this is to imply he was the best thing to happen to humanity since Mother Theresa, or Gandhi – he definitely wasn’t. Frankly, I don’t really care. What matters to me is pretty simple:
Struggle to see the parts, struggle to see the whole. Or else you won’t see anything.
This is really well written Michael. You have a manner of expressing ‘things,’ that keeps me reading the whole article. This is one of your better written articles.