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How Jony Ive Masterminded Apple's New Headquarters (wsj.com)
Reader cdreimer writes: As reported by The Wall Street Journal (paywalled, summary by Apple Insider), Jony Ive explains how he brought forth Steve Jobs' final design, Apple Park, Apple's newest campus headquarters, to life: "On a sunny day in May, Jonathan Ive -- Jony to anyone who knows him -- first encounters a completed section of Apple Park, the giant campus in Cupertino, California, that has turned into one of his longest projects as Apple's chief designer. A section of workspace in the circular, Norman Foster -- designed building is finally move-in-ready: sliding-glass doors on the soundproof offices, a giant European white oak collaboration table, adjustable-height desks, and floors with aluminum-covered hinged panels, hiding cables and wires, and brushed-steel grating for air diffusion. Ive's characteristically understated reaction -- "It's nice, though, isn't it?" -- masks the anxiety he feels each time a product he's designed is about to be introduced to the world. "There's the same rather strange process you go through when you finish a product and you prepare to release it -- it's the same set of feelings," says Ive, who turned 50 in February. "That feels, I don't know, encouragingly healthy, because I would be concerned if we lost that sense of anxiety. I think that would suggest that we were not as self-critical, not as curious, not as inquisitive as we have to be to be able to be effective and do good work." Apple Park is unlike any other product Ive has worked on. There will be only one campus -- in contrast to the ubiquity of Apple's phones and computers -- and it doesn't fit in a pocket or a hand. Yet Ive applied the same design process he brings to technological devices: prototyping to minimize any issues with the end result and to narrow what he calls the delta between the vision and the reality of a project. Apple Park is also the last major project Ive worked on with Steve Jobs, making it more personal for the man Jobs once called his "spiritual partner.""
It's time for a SWIRLY!!!
They take up a full third of the screen space. Is this what content delivery was meant to look like on the internet?
Hopefully WebSense will start to classify Slashdot as a clickbait site.
Making stuff nice for people.
You have seen those youtube videos where the drone does a flyover of the new campus. You get the feeling that this campus is huge, but yet able to be navigable and still look stylish, and the best thing that the designer can say is "It's nice"?
The article writer forgot to note it was all paid by slave labor in China and those who jump from Apple factory windows to their death due to stress and being paid pennies to build Apple products.
This new headquarters is something to be proud of !
The Apple zealots love their new church building.
Where we cover technology for hipsters.
After Apple fades, or evolves, I wonder what the complex will be used for?
'Harlem' in New York is an interesting historical example. It was built as high-priced housing for the upper class. When the upper class didn't move in, it was adopted by a racial minority. It's high quality construction, so it will last a long time.
This new Apple complex seems like it is high quality construction. What will it be used for 100 years from now, after Apple is just marketing history? Will the demographics of the area have been changed? Will it be a dispensary and shelter for homeless people? Will the rich have moved in and hardened it to make it into a fortress/housing complex? Will it be the evil headquarters for some villains?
Keeps the outside world walled out from its private inner garden. Geometrically maximizes he distance between employees on the circumference of a circle.
"Knowing everything doesn't help..."
If you look at aerial photos, the campus looks very similar in size and shape to a synchrotron light source facility. See for example
http://www.esrf.eu/
Now if Apple really is building a synchrotron, I'm impressed. Sadly though I think its just cargo cult - spending billions on a building that looks like something cool, but doesn't really do anything interesting.
All the people who actually "masterminded" that silly pretty building must love when instead the Cult of Personality gives all the credit to the guy who makes colorful icons.
So if Ive has been busy designing the HQ, does that explain why there hasn't been any new radically new designs of Apple stuff for a while?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
"sliding-glass doors on the soundproof offices"
No noisy open plan place where they expect me to concentrate on hacking code?
Sign me up!
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
https://www.wired.com/2017/05/... was an interesting long read about Apple Park's design.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
... but it's going to be a nightmare to work in. The huge open-plan offices are presumably ideal for top-level managers who schmooze around all day having those "water-cooler" conversations. For the rest of us who actually have to get the work done, it's going to suck.
Look, I get it, there's something to be said for collaboration in an open non-structured way. There's also a *lot* to be said for the actual hard work of software engineering that takes (gasp!) *concentration* - modelling that complicated entity-diagram in your head and figuring out how all the parts interact. And then someone coughs, or laughs out loud, or just walks by talking to someone else, or ... ad nauseum.
Then there's the insult factor. These coditauriums are laid out as a series of 4' desks all next to each other, barely large enough for someone to sit at, let alone have the paraphernalia of a working environment on - you know, the real work where your manager wants you to do three things at once. The last time I sat in rows of desks like this was at school. That was a long time ago, and it wasn't pleasant then. It was a stark reminder of your status in the collective, with the managers now getting offices and all the rest of us lined up ready to be yelled at.
The lack of any personal space (hell, even a cube!) is debilitating and demeaning. All that's missing is an EPM armed with a whip walking up and down the aisles screaming 'CODE, you bastards. CODE!' and we'll be back amongst the wage-slaves once again. Back where Mr Ive presumably thinks we belong.
I'm going to give it a go, just to see if it's as truly awful as it looks to be. And if it is (and I expect it to be) I'll find a job elsewhere; I'm not sure that's what Apple wanted from this "ooh shiny" new building. I've given a lot of my life to Apple, and it's pretty sickening to see how they treat us in the name of increased-density workspaces. For fucks sake, not even a cube?
Danger, Will Robinson!
What follows is a meteor shower of post-historical Chicago Manual compound-modifier satirical punctuation.
Configure ears in the upright, locked position, and proceed on impulse power only.
___
I'm pretty sure a fullname–verb ndash is properly ASCII-rendered as Norman_Foster-designed.
This could have been one of the best double-pips ever, if our submitter were irony-enabled about Slashdot's Flintstones–Jetson retro-chic electronic heritage.
Then the headline could have been: How Jony's Norman_Foster-inspired monument to Pandit Chin Thumb ransacked a Death Star fashion parade.
(Unfortunately, my sense of humour often makes the highly mistakable[*] blink--and--you--miss-it-twice "whoosh, whoosh" sound of a side-holster unfriendly dipole photon saber.)
[*] Do notice my clever "-ly" guru override.
Rewriting the full sentence to also address the weird colon:
This sentence, as properly recast with the long, orthodox, purely phrasal appositive, also has its own, internal humour, with an olllllllde-English Teutonic tonsil-vibe inherent in the long-withheld sentence-final verb.
Come to think of it, too much withholding the verb was the subject of a bitter bear-cam quarrel in The Wolf of Wall Street.
Perhaps the colon is well suited to this innovative folding-function, after all.
I pefer sitting under a tree(Newton) in a forest & coding the next usuable software, like a comment-box. We pollute the earth with concrete, steel extraction, AC operation, killing trees for desks, chemicals for cleaning the toilets,... MODERN DESIGN...my A**.