Steve Jobs (1955-2011)

It is no exaggeration to say that Steven Jobs may have been the most important person in the history of design, but of course he was not a designer. I’ve come to think of him, instead, as the world’s greatest art director, the ultimate end user, a one-man focus group for cool. His famously secretive design department (quick, name another Apple designer besides Jonathan Ive? You can’t), was dedicated in large part to one exceedingly challenging task: pleasing Steve. He dreamed, they executed, he critiqued, in an endless, iterative loop that never really ended. (iPhone 5 anyone?) What was no secret to the world was that everything he touched, from products, to movies, to ad campaigns, took on a sophistication, beauty, and smartness that went beyond anyone’s expectations. Steve was a master at the “whole package.”

Designers say it all the time: you can’t do a great project without a great client. In a sense Apple was lucky enough to have in Jobs the most brilliant, intuitive, perceptive design client imaginable.  He kept hitting the ball back to them, harder. If they pleased him—no easy task, surely—the marketplace and the press was usually a breeze. What he brought to the table—for the designers at Apple and the agencies they worked with, especially—was irreplaceable. The good news: there are likely some Jobs-inspired projects and campaigns still in the pipeline. The bad news: They won’t get perfected by the master.

Metropolis’ art directors, Dungjai Pungauthaikan and Ashley Stevens, take a look at Apple’s most memorable campaigns over the last two decades.

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Last month, attendees at the annual Interior Design Educators Council (IDEC) conference, were shown the best films chosen from this year’s Interior Design Education Video Competition. Aiming to change the public perception of the profession, the competition asked students to demonstrate the quality of interior design education and industry standards. This year’s theme:  “How is the public’s health, safety and welfare protection enhanced by the skills of fully prepared health care interior design practitioners.”

The winning video, “Interior Design and Health Care,” was submitted by Louisiana State University students Colette DeJean, Leigh Hardy, Ryan Weilenman, Sarah Tull, and Alyse Lambert, with the guidance of faculty advisor, Danielle Johnson. It builds a strong business case for the process of design and its impact on health care. The description of the seven-stage design process is a logical progression, which would make sense to health care practitioners and administrators, as well as practicing designers. It is an excellent promotion for the value of design, and its impact on the customer, including patients and staff. As I watched the film, I kept wishing that design firms would make similar presentations to their potential clientele across all market segments. As the students have discovered, it’s a great, shorthand tool, to communicate visual messages. Read more…

Since we posted the December 2010 issue last month, our cover story on New York City’s landmarked interiors hit the charts (Most Shared Stories in web language) consistently. And no wonder. These memorable spaces add the kind of rich experience to being in New York that the iconic buildings crowding our skyline can only promise. These rooms deliver an aesthetic trip back in time, a trip that makes a visit here a truly memorable time. Though these theatres, lobbies, restaurants, and stores are public spaces where you can marvel at the detailing—its richness, its restraint, its exquisite sense of proportion, its materials—photographers have a hard time setting up their tripods in them. Access is grudgingly granted or often denied.  Obstacles can be daunting. This is the story of one such adventure.

Documenting this crop of landmarked interiors (including the Cunard Building, Film Center, Brooklyn Historical Society, Time & Life Building, Charles Scribner’s Sons Building) fell to photographer Sean Hemmerle. The tight deadline added to the degree of difficulty. As he tells it, it takes a village (in our case our editorial and art staff) to pull off such an assignment. So I asked Sean to find a comfy chair in his downtown studio, and talk into my Flip camera about photographing the Beacon Theatre, which ended up on our cover. He’s currently updating his website http://seanhemmerle.com/  where you’ll find full documentation of the shoot as well as his other shoots from the world over.  But for now, take a look at the image he took inside the Beacon, lit by only one light bulb, then compare this to what his camera captured when the lights were—seemingly miraculously—turned on.

 
The Beacon Theatre, lit by one lone bulb.

Leonardo Fibonacci was an Italian merchant in the 13th century who spent a lot of time with the Arabs in the North African trading post of Bejaia. From them, he learnt of a deceptively simple series of numbers – 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, … – in which each number was the sum of the two numbers before it. He published this series in a book in 1202, and all hell broke loose.

As Spanish animator Cristóbal Vila illustrates so beautifully in the video below, the Fibonacci series turned out to not only have many hidden patterns and possibilities, but was also everywhere in nature. Vila pulls up the usual suspects – a nautilus shell and the seeds in a sunflower – but my geeky heart was most satisfied by the complexity of that dragonfly’s wing.

Before you replay that wonderful video, you might want to remember that the Fibonacci series was also long considered bread-and-butter mathematics for designers and architects. The ratio of the higher numbers in the series comes closer and closer to the Golden proportion – that divine formula that some say underlies the architecture of the Parthenon and the composition of the Mona Lisa. You may think that Le Corbusier was indulging in hyperbole when he said that the Golden proportion “resounds in man by an organic inevitability, the same fine inevitability which causes the tracing out of the Golden Section by children, old men, savages and the learned.” But consider this – all standard sized credit cards measure 54mm by 86mm, less than a millimeter off of a perfect Golden ratio.

In this month’s issue of Metropolis, Mason Currey wrote about the fantastic story behind Made in Japain, the exhibition of Spanish design at this year’s Tokyo Designer’s Week.

In a bid to make the Japanese see Spain in a new light, the work of big design names like Manolo Blahnik, Jaime Hayón, Lladró, David Delfín, Nani Marquina, Camper , and Pretty Ballerinas y Tous, will be presented with an intriguing conceit. The curators, CuldeSac, claim that in the hoary past, Spain and Japan were one country – Japain – that was torn asunder by shifting tectonic plates. 

In these videos, grandmother Hana explains to 7-year-old Leo why the two nations have so much in common – the secret language of fans, a tradition of floral textiles, and the love of the color red. Read more…

Closing credits from the film “Panels of Change.”

Green media maven Simran Sethi is teaching students to be storytellers by training them to install solar arrays and then Tweet about it. Her course—Green Reporting, Green Building, Green Justice—was offered last semester through the University of Kansas’s William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications. Over spring break she brought the class to the Bay Area where they pitched in at the non-profit Grid Alternatives, which provides solar installations to low-income families. They also visited with other green-focused groups, including the offices of my own employer, William McDonough + Partners, where they tweeted madly about Cradle to Cradle design.   Read more…

Every year on my birthday my grandparents regale me with the story of my birth. Their overly-enthusiastic tale resembles the beginnings of a Roman epic about a god-sired hero’s journey through life. Theirs is certainly not the gushy, stressful, crying mess that my birth probably was. My parents, on the other hand, are largely silent on the subject, except for my father’s advice to new dads: “If she always beats you at cards, suggest a game during the labor; you’re sure to win.” “Remember to take off any rings. Otherwise she’ll break your finger during contractions.” 

In the fourth volume of IDEO’s “Designs On-”, which takes up the theme of birth, only a few products  are designed for the new father. But like my dad’s whimsical advice, each one highlights the business of being a daddy: It’s one hell of a breath-coaching, stats-boasting, driving-like-a-racer journey! Read more…

The smart folks at IDEO—in this case, the New York branch—threw their pointy hats into the digital media ring today, with the introduction of Nelson, Coupland, and Alice. We might call these “concept apps”—for lack of a better term—since they’re at this point ideas awaiting further development (and, presumably, sponsors). Nelson is the proposed news aggregator; Coupland, a book sharing platform; and Alice, a sort of alternative narrative app for fiction. This clever and succinct video should further whet your appetite.

Yet more news from Yves Béhar: the prolific designer has teamed up with GE to develop the WattStation, a plug-in electric vehicle charger with a cute, colorful form. It’s powerful too: according to GE, the WattStation’s “level 2 capability” will decrease typical charging time from 12–18 hours to as little as 4–8 hours. Check out a video of Behar describing his “small, soft, and friendly dispenser of electricity” after the jump. Read more…

At last month’s NeoCon World’s Trade Fair, in Chicago, Metropolis’s Susan Szenasy and Paul Makovsky captured a handful of key designs—and design conversations—on digital video. Above: Roger Martin, the dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and the author of The Design of Business, speaks with Makovsky at an event at the Steelcase showroom in the Merchandise Mart supported by the Consulate General of Canada in Chicago.

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