Notes From an Interview With Jony Ive

Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe, interviewed Jony Ive at Stripe Sessions. Below are my notes from watching the interview. I thought about packaging these up into a more coherent narrative, but I just don’t have the interest. However, I do want to keep these notes for possible reference later, so here’s my brain dump in a more raw form.

On moving fast and breaking things:

breaking stuff and moving on quickly leaves us surrounded by carnage.

There’s an intriguing part in the interview where Ive reflects on how he obsessed over a particular detail about a cable’s packaging. He laughs at the story, almost seemingly embarrassed, because it seems so trivial to care about such a detail when he says it out loud.

But Collison pushes him on it, saying there’s probably a utilitarian argument about how if you spend more time making the packaging right, some people mights save seconds of time and when you multiply that across millions of people, that's a lot of savings. But Collison presumes Ive isn’t interested in that argument — the numbers, the calculation, etc. — so there must be something almost spiritual about investing in something so trivial. Ive’s response:

I believe that when somebody unwrapped that box and took out that cable, they thought “Somebody gave a shit about me.”

I think that’s a nice sentiment. I do.

But I also think there’s a counter argument here of: “They cared when they didn’t have to, but they were getting paid to spend their time that way. And now those who can pay for the result of that time spent get to have the feeling of being cared for.”

Maybe that’s too cynical. Maybe what I’m getting at is: if you want to experience something beautiful, spend time giving a shit about people when you don’t stand to profit from it.

To be fair, I think Ive hints at this with his use of “privilege” here:

I think it’s a privilege if we get to practice and express our concern and care for one another [by making things for one another at work]

People say products are a reflection of an organization’s communication structure.

Ive argues that products are a function of the interpersonal relationships of those who make them:

To be joyful and optimistic and hopeful in our practice, and to be that way in how we relate to each other and our colleagues, [is] how the products will end up.

Ive talking about how his team practiced taking their design studio to someone’s house and doing their work there for a day:

[Who] would actually want to spend time in a conference room? I can’t think of a more soulless and depressing place…if you’re designing for people and you’re in someone’s living room, sitting on their sofa or floor and your sketchbook is on their coffee table, of course you think differently. Of course your preoccupation, where your mind wanders, is so different than if you’re sitting in a typical corporate conference room.

Everybody return to the office!

Ive conveying an idea he holds that he can’t back up:

I do believe, and I wish that I had empirical evidence

What is the place for belief in making software?

Ive speaks about how cabinet makers who care will finish the inside parts of the cabinet even if nobody sees them:

A mark of how evolved we are as people is what we do when no one sees. It’s a powerful marker of who we truly are.

If you only care about what's on the surface, then you are, by definition, superficial.