Playfulness and Ive
With Scott Forstall out and Jonathan Ive now oveerseeing interface design as a part of his duties as benevolent head of Industrial Design at Apple, one can be pretty certain that rich Corinthian leather and green felt will be expunged from future software. (And yes, those examples are just how it looks, not how it works.)
Anticipating a reduction in user interface “exuberance” at Apple, The Talk Show #39 discussed concerns of a loss of “playfulness” with Ive in charge. Such speculation made me remember Peter Burrows’ 2006 piece Who Is Jonathan Ive?:
During an internship with design consultancy Roberts Weaver Group, he created a pen that had a ball and clip mechanism on top, for no purpose other than to give the owner something to fiddle with. “It immediately became the owner’s prize possession, something you always wanted to play with,” recalls Grinyer, a Roberts Weaver staffer at the time. “We began to call it ‘having Jony-ness,’ an extra something that would tap into the product’s underlying emotion.”
That sure sounds like playfulness to me.