DES 40B Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Steve Wozniak, Containerization, Consumerism
LECTURE 1: What did Steve Jobs believe? (Did the iPad make the world a better place?)
• Most important type of ism in design: modernism
• What does the iPad “want”?
o Human centered: meets interfaced
▪ Natural to hold: like a book
▪ New invention to peak interest
o Simple: minimalistic
o Between computer and phone: productivity
o Integration: simple brand design
▪ people can recognize easily
• iPad Form
o Effortless, light, and portable
o Simplicity was an objective for Jobs
▪ inherited from modernism (form follows function)
• History
o Chair and table were chosen very carefully for their histories
▪ Chair is a famous chair: LC3 Chair
• Designed in 1928 by Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret and Charlotte
Perriand
• Famous for who designed it, form, and for the ideas it represented
in the 1920s
▪ Table: Eero Saarinen Pedestal Table by Knoll, 1956
• Epitomizes mid-century modernism
• Eero Saarinen, Gateway Arch, St.Louis, MO, 1965
• Eero Saarinen, TWA Flight Center, 1962
• Modernism
o Minimal ornament
o Efficiency
o Machine-like
o Modern materials (e.g. aluminum)
• Modernism enables continuity in Apple Design
o Jonny Ive can continue the design of Apple due to shared design ethos beliefs
with Jobs
o Apple itself has a modernist design
• Contradiction: conditions of production
o Apple computers are complicated, so they are largely handmade products
o To make them affordable, and to increase profit margins, Apple assembles them
in China, where labor costs are much lower than in the USA
o Apple ignored the larger ethos of modernism, which was to make the world more
just and improve life for everyone
o Jobs believed that design was a force for improved communications,
understanding and democracy
LECTURE 2: “What did the Arts and Crafts movement believe?”
• William Morris, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 1896
o A political statement: react against mass-produced methods
o Handmade book: doing things the old-fashioned, expensive way
o Intention of the book’s maker was to “slow down” progress and innovation
o William Morris works with books, textiles, wallpaper, patterns
• William Morris believed that design should unify designer, maker, and consumer
• Arts and Crafts as the pioneer “maker movement”
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