[ed. Aesthetics, design, conformity, and commerce. Another perspective on Steve Jobs and Apple.]
The late Steve Jobs is known to have been very keen on "taste." Microsoft has absolutely no taste, he said, going on to explain that by this he meant that "they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their product." Great products, he said, were a "triumph of taste." The exquisite taste of Jobs himself has long been a matter of doctrine in the tech world. Kevin Kelly's remarks after his death expressed the general sentiment: "Steve Jobs was a CEO of beauty. In his interviews and especially in private, Jobs often spoke about Art. Taste. Soul. Life. And he sincerely meant it, as evidenced by the tasteful, soulful products he created over 30 years."
The widespread admiration for Apple's design ethos is in two parts: one functional, the other aesthetic. The functional aspects of Apple's products can indeed be magical and thrilling. But the vibe of Apple's product design is uniformly cool and impersonal, and the monolithic sterility of their glassy retail palaces is really something shocking. So far as design goes, it's an imperial aesthetic, entirely lacking a human dimension—or a potted plant. And this remains so, no matter how much the marketers have tried to soften things up with the aid of Justin Long, John Hodgman and sassy dancing silhouettes. Bow down, Apple seems to say. And in the cold, Big Brotherly sway of uniformity that it holds over millions upon millions of people, Apple seems to deny or even thwart the natural world, and with it the individual, the mutable, the unscientific, the instinctive, the flesh and blood. It won't surprise me a bit when they provide snow-white Matrix plugs to poke tidily into the back of your head. Or maybe even the heart plugs from Dune. (...)
For someone who thought that taste was connected to originality, one can't help noting that Jobs's taste was derivative in the extreme; he attempted a mid-century minimalism very much in the mold of Dieter Rams, for many decades the chief designer at Braun. (Rams' influence came to Apple largely through its own chief designer, Jonathan Ive, who has long acknowledged the debt.) It's not clear that taste borrowed at two removes can be characterized as exquisite, let alone visionary. And both Rams and Raymond Loewy, that other titan of mid-century industrial design, displayed such absolute originality that one can't help thinking that the efforts of Apple haven't quite reached the bar they set.
Still more strikingly, there is a huge disconnect between the ethos of Rams and that of Jobs—and Apple. Rams is an instinctive meliorist who believes that design can influence the world in a positive way: that is to say morally, not only aesthetically.
by Maria Bustillos, The Awl | Continue reading:
Photo by vpisteve.
