by Jean-Louis Gassée

It’s sad to see the man who gave Apple such a signal design identity move on. But critics who sense doom now that Apple Design will report through Operations badly misunderstand what Design really means for an industrial company that manufactures hundreds of millions of devices.

I was on a long road trip — and a Monday Note rest — in Italy when the news broke: Jony Ive leaves Apple!

As luck would have it, I chanced upon a show in Milano, 40 years of Italian Industrial Design, on the same day as the Ive announcement. Olivetti’s famous Lettera 22 typewriter designed by Marco Nizzoli; the Lettera 35 by Mario Bellini who also designed the elegant Olivetti Divisumma calculators and worked on the ancestor of today’s personal computers, the Programma 101; Brion Vega TV sets and stereos designed by Marco Zanuso and Richard Sapper, authors of other iconic products manufactured in huge quantities such as the Tizio lamp still with us…

As I strolled through the exhibit, I was reminded of Jony Ive’s lovely Bondi Blue iMac; the “desk lamp” iMac G4 with its exquisitely judged mechanism and surprisingly good transparent plastic loudspeakers; the titanium Powerbooks; the Macbook Air; the iPods; the iPhones…

Where would Apple be — what would it be — without Sir Jony’s designs, without a body of work that helped redefine Apple and put it at the pinnacle of style?

The break gave me an opportunity to contemplate the hysteria over Ive’s departure, from the Apple fans as they step through the five stages of grief (bring on the smelling salts!), to the too-predictable recurrence of Apple Doom talk. We also saw a hybrid: Erstwhile Ive fans who think he’s been slumming and slumping lately, from the round 2013 Mac Pro a.k.a. the trash can, one that needed six years to get a successor; to the inexplicably bad keyboards of the last three years of MacBooks (rumor says they’ll be replaced next year).

A Tweet from mental hygienist The Macalope summarizes the contorted reactions to Sir Jony’s departure:

“It’s going to be fun hearing the people who said design was dead at Apple bemoan the loss of the person chiefly responsible for designing all the things they said were so poorly designed.”

A more serious concern among the commentators is Apple’s new org chart. With Ive’s departure, Apple Design no longer reports to the CEO, but to the COO of Operations. As voiced by John Gruber in his eminently readable Daring Fireball blog:

“…when Jobs was at the helm, all design decisions were going through someone with great taste. Not perfect taste, but great taste. But the other part of what made Jobs such a great leader is that he could recognize bad decisions, sooner rather than later, and get them fixed.”

Gruber is hardly a doomsayer; he offers that Ive’s departure “may be good news” for Apple. Others, who are less sanguine about the re-org, foresee the Dark Ages:

“The design team is made up of the most creative people, but now there is an operations barrier that wasn’t there before,” one former Apple executive said. “People are scared to be innovative.”

This is silly, and belies a misunderstanding. There’s a difference between the traditional, personal, “artistic” design (and taste) that presides over the composition of, say, a 15th century Botticelli painting, and the Industrial Design (ID) that’s practiced today by any successful hardware company.

Helpfully defined by Wikipedia [as always, edits and emphasis mine], Industrial Design is…

[…] a process of design applied to products that are to be manufactured through techniques of mass production.

Industrial Design goes beyond the fit between form and function that we think of as good design, ID makes sure the product — cars, typewriters, iPhones — can be manufactured in large quantities, meeting cost and reliability targets.

A personal example will help.

When I was in charge of products at Apple in a previous century, we went hunting for “designers”. Not knowing where to look, we started with the auto industry, a field populated with names that still resonate: Battista “Pinin” Farina, Bertone, Raymond Loewy, Robert Chapron, Bruno Sacco…

One of our first meetings was with Giorgetto Giugiaro at his offices near Torino. I knew he had designed many cars, including the iconic and ever-lasting Volkswagen Golf, and so I thought of him as a designer, a fashionable stylist. He set me straight with a story of his own. Renault had asked Giugiaro to fill a hole in its car lineup…Quick! So Giugiaro looked through the Renault organ bank (engines, transmissions, etc.) and designed not just a car but, more important, the production machine that would excrete the Renault 19.

Giugiaro was emphatic about the assignment and the accomplishment: His company built and installed the production line and trained the Renault personnel. This, he said, is Industrial Design. (The Wikipedia article is also guilty of the ID misunderstanding; it says that Giugiaro merely “styled” the Renault 19.)

Elsewhere in his studio we saw a prototype that, with variations, could become a Saab, Lancia, Fiat, or perhaps a Toyota. And then there were the curtained bays that hid Giugiaro’s works in progress…

As for Sir Jony himself, he should bask in the pleasant glow of successful products that, as Steve Jobs liked to say, “make a dent in the universe”. The misfires? No one bats 1.000.

Ive is a living representative of the relatively new lineage of industrial designers, of artists and engineers who understand that to design a product means taking care of the Look and Feel and the operational factors that are required to deliver their wares in extremely large quantities, on time, while meeting cost and reliability targets.

Freed from the strictures of Apple’s org chart and politics, perhaps Ive can now spread his wings even further.

Jony Ive is a master; he has disciples who’ll make him proud — in their own way.

— JLG@mondaynote.com