Sir Jony Ive, designer

0:00BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. And for rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast. I hope you enjoy listening.

0:45My castaway this week is the designer Sir Johnny Ive. He is, by any measure, one of the most, if not the most, celebrated and influential designers today. The products he created at Apple, alongside his best friend and colleague, the late Steve Jobs, have changed our lives and our world in ways we're still only just beginning to understand. His designs for phones, music players and watches shifted our ideas about what a computer could be and do, taking what was once a workplace tool and making it personal, something we carry with us or even wear. In the process, they helped to make Apple the world's first trillion-dollar company.

1:24His father was a silversmith and influential educator who spent his working life making sure design was taken seriously as part of the British school curriculum and by his son, though the projects they worked on together, including a go-kart, a treehouse and a toboggan, were often devised for fun. His name is on over 14 ,000 patents worldwide and alongside technological icons, his creations include a comb, a desk and a foldable comic relief red nose. In 2019, he set up his own design firm, Love From, named in honour of his late best friend, who believed creating designs was an act of generosity to humankind.

2:02He says, In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation. Sir Johnny Ive, welcome to Desert Island Discs. It's lovely to be here, Lauren. Thank you. Thrilled to have you. You describe yourself, Johnny, as very present in the world. The artist Grayson Perry talks sometimes about his job as being to notice things. And I wonder if you can relate to that, that idea of being alive to the world and noticing it. Innately, I'm hugely sensitive. So I was a painfully shy child that would spend a lot of time, I think, in my own head.

2:45But that's not because I was doing nothing. I was in my own head observing and I guess reacting to what I saw. yeah I think it's both a blessing and a curse in what way tell me more about that well I think we can all see the same thing and it's what you take away how you interpret whether it's an interaction whether it's an object but it is that acute sensitivity to the way people relate to each other the way they relate to their built environment even the natural environment I think that one of the struggles I have though is in some ways, I think ironically, I struggle with being present in the now because I spend so much of my life in my head in the future.

3:34The way I try to understand the future is I'm obsessed with the past. And so the bit that often gets missed out is right now. Do you think that's part of your makeup and who you are and why you became a designer? Or is it part of having spent so much time in your life just thinking about who made that? Why does it work that way? Could it be better? I think spending too much time in my head, really not feeling I had a choice. What I did have a choice about was that this started off as just innately who I was, was I'm so curious. not in a gentle or passive way but furiously curious it drives me crazy if we just accept someone's dogma whether it's a theory an idea or whether it's a way that we're supposed to behave or whether it's a building an object I just want to understand why why why is it like that I mean this is an example of how how noisy my head will get because I mean every single made object to me I see is in a way an ambassador or certainly a representative of the people that made it I mean it gives you such a clear idea about what motivated them what their values were and so I think it's quite easy to be completely lost in in the wonder of just questioning why things are the way they are.

5:01Many of the products that you work on Johnny have been technologically advanced. Now, would you describe yourself as a techie person? No, I'm not interested in technology for technology's sake. I'm interested in people. And I actually think that not rolling around in the joys and gorgeousness of technology for technology's sake is a good qualification to try and figure out how can people connect in an intuitive and natural way to extraordinary capability. It's time for your first disc, Johnny. What have you got for us and why? This is Really Saying Something by Bananarama and Fun Boy 3. To me, when I listen to this, I can smell morning toast.

5:52So I would listen to this a lot at college and I was a real night owl. I've always done my best. I think the best work has been at night and I would work through the night. And if it had been a productive and creative night, as the sun would come up, I can see and smell the toast and listening to Bananarama. He was really saying something Really saying something Bop-bop-shooby-doo-ah Bop-bop-shooby-doo-ah I was walking down the street Do-a-do-ah When this boy started following me Oh yeah I ignored all the things he'd say Do-a-do-ah He moved me in every way Bananarama and Fun Boy 3 really saying something.

6:50So, Johnny Ive, you were born in Chingford in East London in 1967, and your parents, Mike and Pam, were both teachers. Now, I know your dad was a huge influence on your choice of career. Tell me, how did he inspire you? He was a maker, and there's something about watching him work. I mean, it started by watching him take a piece of silver, and workshops are quite scary. I mean, as a small boy, you had these furnaces and there were the oxyacetylene torches and that would breathe and spit fire. And then there's the bashing, the relentless bashing and bashing. And but somehow from something that may appear dirty, something beautiful emerges.

7:42and ultimately what I think, I don't know, struck me was that process was him that took a sheet of metal and it became a beautiful bowl with utility, purpose and value. And the two of you made together. What kind of things did you work on? What sort of projects? We didn't have much money as I was growing up and the most remarkable and precious gift was his time. And at Christmas, he would promise me a day that we would go into the workshop having designed, and I didn't really know what that word was and really what it meant, but that we would decide we were going to make a toboggan or we were going to make a treehouse and that I would have to describe what I wanted.

8:35and that was with drawings and with some words and some hand-waving. That's a bit of a tricky ask. I mean, at what age would you have been doing that? I was probably seven or eight and he was always so busy and always doing other stuff. So I think it was probably this perfect storm of having his attention and being able to participate in something that I'd only been a spectator in before. Your dad went on to become an educator who was hugely influential. He advocated to get DT, design technology, onto the school curriculum. I think it would have been CDT initially. He helped write the curriculum too.

9:16When did you start to understand his legacy and how much he had changed things? Well, I think when I started to confront some of the prejudice that I think was at the heart of his conviction and work in education, this sense that if you make something that's of lesser value than if you write it, this idea that it's dangerously close just to being a hobby. and every bone in his body and his gift. And, you know, he wanted to study silversmithing and cabinet making and the academic pressure to do something other than that, I think had a huge impact on him. And as we've heard, your mother Pam was also a teacher.

9:59What was her influence on you when you were growing up? Later in life, you know, she trained as a therapist and she was, I mean, very thoughtful, constantly reading. You know, like me, I think she spent a lot of time thinking, but she was very clear in her sense of herself and was never bullied into or did not easily accept, received wisdom, the dogma of others. Sometimes that would make her appear contrarian. But she was very clear and very boundaried. And I think her influence would have been learning to become comfortable with having a different opinion. And you were very close to your dad's parents.

10:44You spent a lot of time with them. What do you remember about those years? They grew all of their own food, you know, up in North London in this greenhouse in the garden. but they had the Tom and Barbara Good lifestyle. I mean, some of my early memories were going up to Neal's Yard in my father's old Volvo Amazon and it was the one place in Neal's Yard where you could bulk buy lentils. And I hate lentils. I hated them then and even more now. Very good for you, John. It's a shame. Well, do you know what I associate them with was apart from them always being available in enormous volume, which was ominous, was what they tasted like.

11:30But mainly I remember using, do you remember those using PVA glue, like these little green spreaders, and sticking them onto paper as a collage? You couldn't relate to it as a food. I just thought this is the place for these lentils stuck to this paper and not in my tummy. I think it's time for some more music Disc number two if you wouldn't mind What are we going to hear next? The police This is me, I think I was 12, 13 in London What really struck me was how powerfully simple it was when it drops back to Andy Summers' riff in the verse and Copland's rim shots how simple and in all of that space and the discipline of the framework, how powerful.

12:22When the eloquence escapes me Their logic ties me up and wrecks me Do, do, do, da, da, da, da That's all I want to say to you Do, do, do, da, da, da The innocence will pull me through The do-do-do, the da-da-da Is all I want to say to you The police. Johnny, you've described being very shy when you were a little boy, but you have said that that quality was useful to you in some ways. Tell me a little bit more about that. Why exactly? That drove me into my head. or perhaps it wasn't that it's that I daren't venture out I I struggled to speak to you know in front of more than just a half a dozen people really into my um early 20s but I think being in my head I learned to be comfortable I suppose with myself not needing the affirmation of other people.

13:38And so in that space that was private and somehow inviolate, I could ask a lot of questions and not feel embarrassed about their apparent naivety. And while the loneliness wasn't particularly easy and feeling odd, wasn't particularly joyful, you know, wait to spend a lot of my adolescence and childhood. I really found it was a fabulous foundation for being able to, I mean, you can cover a lot of ground in your head that you can't if you really are in the world. But you were also engaging with things. I mean, as you say, this incredibly curious, interested kids, presumably the kind of kid who like to take things apart, I'm guessing.

14:28where I would then I think dare venture out was with things not people and so that there was this one alarm clock it felt you could there were little windows in the back where you could see all the gears and the springs and the movement it was like there was this little city inside this this white casing and that one I just had to start to take to pieces and they're really complicated and the springs the way the springs are wound when they go you've not got a hope to reassemble and what I'm thinking about too is watching you tell that story is that you talk with your hands you still that's such a an important part of how you express yourself obviously yeah I can't imagine not not talking about taking a spring to pieces without moving my hands and you were saying when when you were going through the education system yourself you came up against the prejudices and that was when you started to understand where your dad was coming from.

15:29So what did you experience? You know, was it in school? Someone saying, oh well, you're not very good at this, you better go and do some woodwork or something like that. I mean, I love reading and I love writing. Well, I do now, but when I was younger, I struggled terribly with both reading and writing and lots of assumptions were made about my intelligence. Perhaps then my interpretation was those assumptions inferred or influenced people's perceptions of my value and in turn that made me not feel great about myself I think that really informs why well you go and make something in the workshop was because you were unsuccessful in these other academic subjects.

16:15And rather than being celebrated, it was a way to amuse yourself and, you know, keep you occupied. Things have changed so much. And, you know, we thank your dad for that. I mean, you must be very proud of his achievements. I am so, so proud of him. I mean, he's, despite not being in the best of health, he still spends days making things. He still spends days in the workshop. But I am very conscious of just the, I don't even know where to begin in terms of how I can be here now is largely because of him. And what about your early designs? I think your pet hamster was a beneficiary of one of your earliest ideas.

17:06Yeah, I remember making this ridiculous hamster cage. Why was the hamster cage ridiculous? Well, it featured a lot of toilet rolls. I mean, it was just, it was a vast network of tubes. Oh, from a hamster's point of view, that sounds absolutely brilliant. Well, maybe it was presumptuous on my part. I made a lot of assumptions about what my hamster was interested in. And wouldn't it be awful if I completely got it wrong? Just because he ran fast through those tubes doesn't mean he was necessarily happy. Oh, it's so difficult to understand. The mind of a hamster. That's a whole other show. It's time for some more music, I think, Sir Johnny Ive.

17:45Disc number three. What are we going to hear next? And why are you taking it to the island? This is the theme song from Get Carter by Roy Bard. This has a profound effect on me. The theme tune is when Michael Caine, as Carter, is travelling on the train from London to Newcastle, I'd bought a Walkman at the beginning of my time, at college. It was a sportsman, so it was this bright yellow personal music player. And so this was sat on the train, listening to Roy Budd, imagining I was Michael Caine, going up to Newcastle.

18:53Carter Takes a Train, composed by Roy Budd, from the soundtrack to the film Get Carter. Johnny Ive, as we've heard, in the 80s you studied for an industrial design degree at what was then Newcastle Polytechnic. You spent a lot of time with plaster back then. What do you recall about the work that you were doing? It was a way where you, with your hands, could start to create form. The tutor was somebody called Roy Morris. I remember two things about him. One, he's utterly, utterly consumed that we would learn. It was clearly the most important thing in his life. I mean, drove and drove him. And the other thing was he had a terrible allergy to plaster dust.

19:39And this was before really we would, you know, our understanding of masks really related to sort of hospitals. But Roy would be in the plaster room, which was carnage. There's plaster all over the benches, but the air is thick with plaster dust. I mean I know this sounds it sounds slightly slightly corny but I remember very clearly one being aware of the enormous cost being in that room was to him and what practice what habit was necessary to remind you that it was important that you take the work seriously and that you value the work because if you don't you know the work's not going to be of value and did he get to see your success?

20:27Did he get to see what you went on to do? For a few years. Yeah, the plaster, I think, took a toll. So I think, Johnny, it would have been around this time when you were at the Poly that you came across your first Apple Mac computer. And I know that was a big moment for you. What do you remember about it? So the first time was in a bureau in Jesmond where you could go and rent time you know you could buy an hour and I was just typing my thesis on this thing I wasn't doing any CAD really but just the the joy of being able to type on that and to see a page on the screen and then use a laser printer and also choose the sounds this was the first computer that let you actually change the alert chimes and I was shocked that I had a sense of the people that made it.

21:23They could have been in the room. And you really had a sense of what was on their mind and their values and their sort of joy and exuberance in making something that they knew was helpful and reminded me of how important design was. You were obviously a standout student, Johnny, because you won the Royal Society of Arts Student Design Award two years running and your prize was a travel bursary that you used to travel to the States. So you went to San Francisco for the first time, you got to visit Silicon Valley. What were your impressions of the place when you saw it for the first time? There was, I mean this was the first time I'd been on an aeroplane.

22:10I was 21, my wife and I, Heather and I met in high school and we were married at college and we flew to San Francisco. And this has been very much our joint adventure. I can't even think of doing anything that I've been up to if she wasn't with me. And there was something so beautiful about the quality of light, but it was the optimism. this sense of anything was possible the view of the future being one that wasn't understood by constraint Let's have some more music Johnny Ive your fourth choice today, what's it going to be? This is a song that I recorded, it's of my son he was five and he'd watched the movie Singing in the Rain I wasn't with him when he had watched it so I didn't know and he was dancing around the room singing and I actually suddenly remembered and was so pleased with myself that I had an iPhone with me that I could recall him with no planning and that's so not me this is unrehearsed off the cuff and it's just it's Harry when he's five singing and dancing I'm singing in the rain just singing in the rain What a glorious feeling I'm happy again Singing in the rain La la la la la la la la la la la la la la la Magic.

24:01Well, I don't even need to ask why you want to take that to the island with you. It's obvious. Absolutely magical. Singing in the Rain, composed by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown and performed by Harry Ive. You've two sons. I do. He has a twin brother who's Charlie. Charlie and Harry, wonderful. OK, Johnny, so in the early 90s, Apple invited you to go and work for them in San Francisco, which, as you've described, you'd already fallen in love with. It wasn't a great time for the business back then, though. Co-founder Steve Jobs had been ousted and you said the company was dying. What was happening?

24:35Well, when I arrived, I moved over in 92 and I was very aware of the shadow of Steve, his beliefs, his values, his vision. But I guess it was just this equation of the pursuit of other priorities was becoming louder and clearly becoming more important. Commercial priorities? Yeah, essentially it was. I think when you struggle, then a goal can become just commercial issues. I understand. I mean, if you're losing lots of money, you'd like to stop losing lots of money. The problem there is it means you focus on money and you're normally losing money because the products aren't right. and from 92 to 97 it was a very very difficult season one that I am so grateful for but I still I still get the shivers sometimes you know I would start the day by reading the paper and the headline would always be or in the in the copy at the top the beleaguered company apple I thought that's our name you know we changed it and included the beleaguered and and what kept you going through that?

25:49There were some great compelling offers. Every sensible option was that I should probably come back to London and make a decision, make a change like that. But I just felt that Apple and the founding principles, I believe that people are important. And I have an old school view of design that we're trying to be useful if if we're not we shouldn't be doing it my intuition is a you know incredibly dominant part of how I look at the world and how I think even when I think rationally I pay attention to how I feel one of your first jobs was redesigning the Newton message pad. So that was a small portable device.

26:39It had a notepad and a calendar and a clock, among other things. But it must have been frustrating at the time because, you know, you created this thing and it didn't catch on. It was discontinued. There was just a big gap between the promise of the idea and the reality, the pragmatic reality of what it could do. And it just didn't do it. And it's funny, I don't remember being frustrated. I think being so consumed by wanting to learn, I mean, I was fine because I'd learned, which is, I guess, in retrospect, rather selfish. But I think it's also the context is that there's so much bubbling away.

27:22That was it was an atmosphere, not a product. And so one product not working out that that didn't seem the end of the world. So, Johnny, you hung in there and then in 1997, everything changed. Steve Jobs returned as CEO. We'll talk about his impact on the company later. But first of all, I want to hear about his impact on you. What did you think of him the first time you met? I was, I mean, having, you know, with intention, wanted to learn about him. Initially, he was enormously intimidated. And he came to the design studio. And immediately there was a connection that was so powerful and so strong.

28:05I mean, I'd got into this terrible cycle of having to try and spend a lot of my energy on convincing people about what we should be designing and making. And I'm not very good at that. It was remarkable that despite the limitations of my ability to communicate, Steve understood what I thought and how I felt. And I think probably the overwhelming feeling I had was one of extraordinary gratitude. the heady sense of being understood and feeling relevant and I was feeling increasingly irrelevant and increasingly useless up until that point. Well, we'll find out what happened next in a moment but first I'd love to hear your next track.

29:01What have you got for us, Johnny? This is by Simple Minds, Don't You Forget About Me. And I remember listening to this in a slightly self-centred and overindulgent way when I was leaving England. And it was terribly emotional. I was immigrating. I was leaving this country I loved and defined so much of me. And it was so absurdly pompous to play something that's begging people to not forget about me. But it must mean a lot to you to come back and work with the design museum, to be part of the fabric of British culture. I'm deeply involved with the Royal College of Art. I mean, I have so, so many reasons to be coming back as often as I am.

29:47It means more than I can possibly say.

30:21Simple Minds, don't you forget about me. Sir Johnny Ive, Steve Jobs came back to the business and he was very aware that you needed a hit product to get things back on track. So we asked you to create a network computer that could connect to the Internet. So over to you. How did you set about the task? What I remember so clearly was it wasn't four months after we met. It was the very first day. So you're processing all of the intimidation is waning, but then... Well, one great way of, I mean, there's nothing like an impossible task to take your mind off of your anxiety. Of course, it was current and urgent.

31:04We were within days of becoming bankrupt, literally days. And so we started work from the first day that we met on what became the iMac. How long did you have to develop it? In terms of the first establishing a direction, from a design point of view, we did that in the first probably two or three weeks. And what was the aim? What was the ambition? It's hard to believe, but in 97, people were still struggling to understand the role of the PC, that they were still intimidated. They neither understood its function, certainly what its relevance necessarily was, other than a sophisticated timewriter.

31:52And so I think it was because we weren't preoccupied with the technology and we were really driven by trying to make something for people. It was a fabulous project. So tell me about some of your creative decisions then. The translucent blue casing, the colour white, the handle. these were all very different from anything we'd seen before. The purpose, the goal of having a handle was you may understand nothing about the nature of this object, not understand its capability, but when you see a handle, it references immediately and unambiguously your hand, and you understand, therefore, something about this object, and you make a connection to it.

32:39And so I think that the way the form was developed and the way that we developed the nature of the polymer, that it was slightly translucent and that it was colorful. You could talk about a color, not gigahertz or hard drive capacity. You know, suddenly the language was way more accessible and egalitarian. But the product looked like it had just arrived or it was going to go somewhere. It felt alive. it didn't feel static, it didn't feel stuck. So it was a huge hit, became the fastest selling computer at the time and put Apple back in profit. But obviously it also deepened your friendship with Steve.

33:20The two of you became very close. How much time did you spend together on an average day? We would typically have lunch together pretty much every day of the week. We became very close. Our families became close. We would go on holiday together. But it was what I cherished was that it became a time of creating and nothing else really mattered. It was not characterized by meetings and presentations because that was something that I was hopeless at. This was being able to spend all my time just designing. and it became like a continuous conversation. Steve died in 2011 of cancer. He was just 56.