Mythbusting Apple and what we might learn

There were a few interesting insights from one-time Apple designer, Mark Kawano in a recent article in Fast Company dispelling some of the mythology which surrounds Cupertino's design success. Apple just seems to have been able to tap into the humanity of technology better than most and certainly more often than most. User friendly is an unfriendly phrase, but cuts to a chase.

How Apple does it is still wrapped up (= clouded) in Steve Jobs' extraordinary aura which is never more manifest than in his messianic keynote addresses. I have to confess I was a sucker for them all and can still recall the audience reaction when he unveiled the iPhone in 2007 - "Today we're introducing three revolutionary products... An iPod. A phone. an internet communicator... are you getting it yet?". Well, we're all getting it now.






















Of course we all also get it now from Walter Issacson's biog and others that Jobs was more than a bit of a bastard in the workplace. Kawano defends his old boss to some extent saying Jobs "had a low tolerance for people who didn't care about stuff." Indeed.

But a more revelatory observation is his view that it was Apple's culture that makes the real difference, not that it has the best designers. Rather he claims that the context within the organisation was to value and support design. "Everyone there is thinking about it." Not sex, but the interface, the engineering, the feel. He backs this up by suggesting this is why so many Applytes who are poached never seem to be able to conjure up the creative, design magic again. They've fallen out of the halo of positivity.

So a nurturing creative context, a supportive petrie dish of openness is central to its virtually pre-eminent design chops. Hmmm, whatever the Jobsian fear-factor, what a contrast with so many businesses here. Design is too often seen as cost, a sheen, superficial; tangental, not fundamental. Innovations can be dangerous and change, not to be trusted.

Even within the creative services industries, where the idea should champion all, there can linger a sterile pragmatism that's inhospitable to fresh thinking. It's like the conditions described by HI in Raising Arizona when he confesses that his wife, Edwina's "insides were a rocky place where my seed could find no purchase." There's many a rocky place in our boardrooms. (Note to self: Must not pursue metaphor.) Instead we need more businesses where there's a genuine receptivity to design and where creative proposals can find purchase. Steven Johnson talks of hunches needing to connect with other hunches. Perhaps the culture is as important as the people. It's the sort of environment that served Apple well: we should all learn from it.

How Working in a Box Works.

As well as picking up electrifying performances in all manner of venues, Under Great White Northern Lights, a tour video following The White Stripes across Canada in 2007, is compelling because Jack and ex-wife, stage-sister, Meg are so unguarded at times. And Jack particularly is full of insights on making music and what works for him creatively. 

He tell us that in the early days, his ambition simply to get a chance to perform on-stage used to inspire his work; the hunger keened the edge. But obviously, success has dulled that ache. "I don't have those inspirations now anymore." So now White forces himself to "work in a box", setting strict limitations and restrictions within which he has to operate. Like he'll book a studio for just four or five days and "force yourself to record and album in that time".

It extends to live performances too he admits. So he puts his spare guitar picks way at the back of the stage, making life deliberately difficult if he needs one. Plays guitars that go out of tune easily. Keeps instruments just out of reach. No set list. Hundreds of little difficulties that add a tension, mixing in an extra channel of risk to the on-stage energy.

Of course, anyone who knows The White Stripes will be familiar with the strict visual template they followed rigorously too: wearing only red, black and white. Voice, guitar, drums. It's all about just Three. Less choices make for better ideas. Constrictions to create he calls it at one point.

Brian Eno agrees: "the act of feeling frustration is an essential part of the creative process". The electronicist/producer/collaborator suggests the endless possibilities of digital tools in the studio, all the electronics, the samplers, sequencers and editors, can limit inspiration rather than spark it. There are too many routes to explore. So Eno also introduces difficulties or as he calls them, "option cancelling devices". (See around 26:45 in)



Lecture: Brian Eno (New York, 2013) from Red Bull Music Academy on Vimeo.

For example, a recording session in which there can be no artificial multiplication or duplication - so no echoing, no reverb, no sampling. If he wants a sound repeated, he plays it again. And again. Or he'll only allow instruments on one side of the studio space to be used. "Before there is a breakthrough, there has to be a block."

It's an element of Jonah Lehrer's thesis too, in his now discredited examination of where ideas come from, Imagine: How Creativity Works. He took little too much creative licence when it came to quoting others, but on the importance of creating a challenge to trigger inspiration, he's on the same page. “You break out of the box by stepping into shackles,” he writes, reflecting for example, on the constraints poets put themselves under, the scanning, the rhymes. The 17 Japanese on of the haiku.

Swedish painter, Anders Zorn has had the limited palette of colours he's credited as working with named after him. This turn of century artist, probably best known for his nudes, used only 4 colours: Yellow Ochre, Cadmium Red, Ivory Black and White. Out of these he summoned up a seemingly limitless spectrum. These basic colour building blocks can flavour any subject, but it requires discipline, trial and error, inspiration. It's not hard to imagine the tension when Zorn was looking to evoke a subtle skin tone and needed to find it among his frugal four blobs of paint.

Just as Eno admires the musician who can master every corner of their instrument and explore it right to the margins, unlike the digital composer who can never exhaust the reconfiguring of ones and zeros, Zorn knew that restricting his palette forced him to be more creative. "Inspiration and the work ethic ride beside each other" is how Jack White sees it.

Setting ourselves parameters can force the best out of us creatively. Sure, there's a time to dream untethered, but putting one's self in the box, cancelling the options fires up a powerful creative energy that can make a difference.