Jony Ive: "I believe we sense when there's been care taken with a product"

In the clip below, Jony shares that one of the things he has come to feel really strongly is that customers can sense when care has been taken with a product:

“I can’t articulate why, but I believe we sense when there’s been care taken with a product. Just in the same way we sense carelessness.”

Jony believes that most of our manufactured environment today sadly testifies to a degree of carelessness:

“It testifies to: get it built fast, make it cheap, make it look different. There’s just that sort of carelessness. And I just think it’s one of the things that we can strive to do for humanity, and it’s a way that we can serve: is to take care.”

This philosophy may have been instilled by Steve Jobs. In Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs, there’s a story of the time Jobs insisted that every element of the Macintosh computer be beautiful—down to the circuit boards inside: “Look at the memory chips. That’s ugly. The lines are too close together.”

When the computer was finally perfected, Jobs had the engineers’ names engraved inside each one. “Real artists sign their work,” he told them.

Isaacson comments:

“No one would ever see them, but the members of the team knew that their signatures were inside, just as they knew that the circuit board was laid out as elegantly as possible.”

Full video: Vanity Fair “Apple’s Jony Ive Full Conversation with Graydon Carter” (Oct 2014)