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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.""
Making stuff nice for people.
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.
... 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?