Monday, July 25, 2011

Wahai Pemuda!

Sesunguhnya, sebuah pemikiran itu akan berhasil diwujudkan manakala kuat rasa keyakinan kepadanya, ikhlas dalam berjuang di jalannya, semakin bersemangat dalam merealisasikannya, dan kesiapan untuh beramal dan berhorban dalam mewujudkannya. Sepertinya keempat rukun ini, yakni iman, ikhlas, semangat dan amal merupakan karakter yang melekat pada diri pemuda.

Karena sesungguhnya dasar keimanan itu adalah nurani yang menyala, dasar keikhlasan adalah hati yang bertakwa, dasar semangat adalah perasaan yang menggelora, dan dasar amal adalah kemauan yang kuat. Itu semua tidak terdapat kecuali pada diri pemuda. Oleh karena itu, sejak dulu hinga sekarang pemuda merupakan pilar kebangkitan.Dalam setiap kebangkitan, pemuda merupakan rahasia kekuatannya. Dalam setiap fikrah, pemuda adalah panji-panjinya.


Beranjak dari sini, sesungahnya banyak hewajiban-kewajiban kalian, besar tangungjawab kalian, semakin berlipat hak-hak umat yang harus kalian tunaikan dan semakin berat amanat yang terpikul di pundah kalian. kalian harus berpikir panjang, banyak beramal,bijak dalam menentukan sikap, maju untuk menjadi penyelamat, dan hendaklah kalian mampu menunaikan hak-hak umat ini dengan sempurna.

(Hasan Al-Bana)

Jonathan Ive

Industrial Designer
The winner of the Design Museum's inaugural Designer of the Year award in 2003 was JONATHAN IVE (1967-), senior vice-president of design at Apple whose innovations include the iPod and iMac.


As senior vice-president of design at Apple, Jonathan Ive has combined what he describes as “fanatical care beyond the obvious stuff” with relentless experiments into new tools, materials and production processes, to design such ground-breaking products as the iMAC, iBook, the PowerBook G4 and the iPod MP3 player. He won the Design Museum's first Designer of the Year prize for the 2002 iMac and iPod.

Born in London in 1967, Ive studied art and design at Newcastle Polytechnic before co-founding Tangerine, a design consultancy where he developed everything from power tools to televisions. In 1992, one of his clients – Apple – offered him a job at its headquarters in Cupertino, California. Working closesly with Apple’s co-founder, Steve Jobs, Ive developed the iMac. As well as selling more than 2m units in its first year, the iMac transformed product design by introducing colour and light to the drab world of computing where, until its arrival, new products were encased in opaque grey or beige plastic.

Ive and his close-knit team of designers at Apple have since applied the same lateral thinking and passionate attention to detail to the development of equally innovative new products such as the Cube, the iPod and the PowerBook G4, the world’s lightest and slimmest 17 inch laptop, and the ultra-slim iMac G5.


Q. How did you you first become interested in design?
A. I remember always being intrested in made objects. The fact they had been designed was not obvious or even interesting to me initially. As a kid, I remember taking apart whatever I could get my hands on. Later, this developed into more of an interest in how they were made, how they worked, their form and material.

Q. When did you decide to pursue design as a career and how did you go about it?
A. By the age of thirteen or fourteen I was pretty certain that I wanted to draw and make stuff. I knew that I wanted to design but I had no idea what I’d design as I was interested in everything: cars, products, furniture, jewellery, boats. After visiting a few design consultancies I eventually decided that product design would be a pretty good foundation as it seemed the most general. I studied art and design at school and went on to Newcastle Polytechnic. I figured out some basic stuff - that form and colour defines your perception of the nature of an object, whether or not it is intended to. I learnt the fundamentals of how you make things and I started to understand the historical and cultural context of an object’s design. I wish my drawing skills had improved, but while that bothered me then, it doesn’t now.

Q. After graduating, you joined the design consultancy Tangerine. In retrospect, how useful was your experience there?
A. I was pretty naïve. I hadn’t been out of college for long but I learnt lots by designing a range of different objects: from hair combs and ceramics, to power tools and televisions. Importantly, I worked out what I was good at and what I was bad at. It became pretty clear what I wanted to do. I was really only interested in design. I was neither interested, nor good at building a business.

Q. Why did you decide to join Apple?
A. I went through college having a real problem with computers. I was convinced that I was technically inept, which was frustrating as I wanted to use computers to help me with various aspects of my design. Right at the end of my time at college I discovered the Mac. I remember being astounded at just how much better it was than anything else I had tried to use. I was struck by the care taken with the whole user experience. I had a sense of connection via the object with the designers. I started to learn more about the company, how it had been founded, its values and its structure. The more I learnt about this cheeky almost rebellious company the more it appealed to me, as it unapologetically pointed to an alternative in a complacent and creatively bankrupt industry. Apple stood for something and had a reason for being that wasn’t just about making money.
In the early 1990s, I was living in London again and working with a number of clients in Japan, the US and Europe at Tangerine. Apple did a search to find a new design consultant and decided to work with me. I still remember Apple describing this fantastic opportunity and being so nervous that I would mess it all up. While I had never thought that I could work successfully as part of a corporation - always assuming that I would work independently - at the end of a big programme of work for Apple, I decided to accept a full- time position there and to move to California.

Q. You have described the experience of your first few years at Apple as frustrating. Why was this? And what changed?
A. One of my reasons for joining Apple had been a frustration associated with consulting. Working externally made it difficult to have a profound impact on product plans and to truly innovate. By the time you had acccepted a commission so many of the critical decisions had already been made. Increasingly I had also come to believe that to do something fundamentally new requires dramatic change from many parts of an organisation.
When I joined Apple the company was in decline. It seemed to have lost what had once been a very clear sense of identity and purpose. Apple had started trying to compete to an agenda set by an industry that had never shared its goals. While as a designer I was certainly closer to where the desicions were being made, but I was only marginally more effective or influential than I had been as a consultant. This only changed when Steve Jobs (co-founder of Apple) returned to the company. By re-establishing the core values he had established at the beginning, Apple again pursued a direction which was clear and different from any other companies. Design and innovation formed an important part of this new direction.

Q. What are the advantages of designing for one company? And the disadvantages? What are the particular characteristics of the set-up at Apple that has made the experience of working there rewarding for you?
A. It is pretty humbling when so much of your effectiveness is defined by context. Not only is it critical that the leadership of a company clearly understands its products and the role of design, but that the development, marketing and sales teams are also equally committed to the same goals. More than ever I am aware that what we have achieved with design is massively reliant on the commitment of lots of different teams to solve the same problems and on their sharing the same goals. I like being part of something that is bigger than design. There is a loyalty that I have for Apple and a belief that this company has an impact beyond design which feels important. I also have a sense of being accountable as we really live, sometimes pretty painfully with the consequences of what we do.

Q. Similarly, what are the advantages - and disadvantages - of concentrating on the design of a particular product, in your case, the computer? And is the computer a richer and more rewarding area of design for you to concentrate on now than other products?
A. I had been concerned that moving away from working independently for a number of clients on a broad range of products would be difficult. Surprisingly this has not been an issue, as we are really designing systems that include so many different components - headphones, remote controls, a mouse, speakers as well as computers. The issue has really been the focus on designing technologically based products. I love working within such a relatively new product category. The opportunities are remarkable as you can be working on just one product that can instantly shatter an entire history of product types and implicated systems. The iPod is a good example as it is not only a very new product but it clearly turns our users’ previous experience and understanding of storing and listening to music upside down.

Q. What are the defining qualities of the design of an Apple product? To what degree are they related to the design heritage of Apple before your arrival there?
A. In the 1970s, Apple talked about being at the intersection of technology and the arts. I think that the product qualities are really consequent to the bigger goals that were established when the company was founded. The defining qualities are about use: ease and simplicity. Caring beyond the functional imperative, we also acknowledge that products have a significance way beyond traditional views of function.

Q. How would you describe the organisation of the Apple design team?
A. We have assembled a heavenly design team. By keeping the core team small and investing significantly in tools and process we can work with a level of collaboration that seems particularly rare. Our physical environment reflects and enables that collaborative approach. The large open studio and massive sound system support a number of communal design areas. We have little exclusively personal space. In fact, the memory of how we work will endure beyond the products of our work.

Q. What is it that distinguishes the products that your team develops?
A. Perhaps the decisive factor is fanatical care beyond the obvious stuff: the obsessive attention to details that are often overlooked, like cables and power adaptors. Take the iMac, our attempts to make it less exclusive and more accessible occurred at a number of different levels. A detail example is the handle. While its primary function is obviously associated with making the product easy to move, a compelling part of its function is the immediate connection it makes with the user by unambiguously referencing the hand. That reference represents, at some level, an understanding beyond the iMac’s core function. Seeing an object with a handle, you instantly understand aspects of its physical nature - I can touch it, move it, it’s not too precious.
With the Power Mac G4 Cube, we created a techno-core suspended in a single piece of plastic. You don’t often get to design something out of one piece of plastic. This was about simplifying – removing clutter, not just visual but audio clutter. That’s why the core is suspended in air. The air enters the bottom face and without a fan (therefore very quietly) travels through the internal heat sink. Movement within the cube is all vertical – the air, the circuit boards and even the CD eject vertically. The core is easily removed for access to internal stuff.

Q. You have said that, historically, advances in design have been driven by the development of new materials. Which new materials excite you most now?
A. Materials, processes, product architecture and construction are huge drivers in design. Polymer advances mean that we can now create composites to meet very specific functional goals and requirements. From a processing point of view we can now do things with plastic that we were previously told were impossible. Twin shooting materials - moulding different plastics together or co-moulding plastic to metal gives us a range of functional and formal opportunites that really didn’t exist before. The iPod is made from twin-shot plastic with no fasteners and no battery doors enabling us to create a design which was dense completely sealed. Metal forming and, in particular, new methods of joining metals with advanced adhesives and laser welding is another exciting area at right now.

Q. What are the other catalysts for design's development today?
A. New products that replace multiple products with substantial histories is obviously exciting for us. I think another catalyst is the tenacity and high expectations of consumers. With the iPod, the MP3 phenomenon gave us an opportunity to develop an entirely new product and one which could carry 4,000 songs. The big wrestle was to trying to develop something that was new, that felt new and that had a meaning relevant to what it was.

Q. Conversely, why are so many new products so bland and derivative?
A. So many companies are competing against each other with similar agendas. Being superficially different is the goal of so many of the products we see. A preoccupation with differentiation is the concern of many corporations rather than trying to innovate and genuinely taking the time, investing the resources and caring enough to try and make something better.
© Design Museum, 2007

BIOGRAPHY
1967
Born in London, where he spends his childhood.
1985
Studies design and art at Newcastle Polytechnic (now Northumbria University).
1989
Becomes a partner at Tangerine, a London-based design consultancy where he works on a wide range of products from power tools to wash basins.
1992
Moves to San Francisco to join the Apple design team.
1998
Appointed vice-president of industrial design at Apple.
Launch of the original iMac, which sells 2 million units in its first year.
1999
Introduction of the Apple iBook, the 22” Cinema Display, PowerMac G4 Tower and iSub.
2000
Launch of the Apple G4 Cube.
2001
Apple introduces the Titanium PowerBook G4 and the iPod portable MP3 player.
2002
Launch of the new sunflower-inspired iMac with 15” and 17” floating screens. Introduction of the eMac, a version of the iMac specially developed for use in the education sector.
2003
Apple launches the 12” PowerBook and the 17” PowerBook, which at 1” thick and 6.8 lbs is the world’s slimmest and lightest 17” notebook computer.
Wins the Design Museum's first Designer of the Year prize.
2004
Launch of the multi-coloured iPod mini and ultra-slim iMac G5.
2005
Appointed senior vice-president of design at Apple. Launch of the Mac Mini.
2006
Jonathan Ive was awarded a CBE.
2007
He received a National Design Award in the product design category for his work on the iPhone.
2008
He received the MDA Personal Achievement Award for the design of the iPhone.
© Design Museum, 2007

FURTHER READING
See more of Jonathan Ive and the Apple Design Team's work at apple.com
Visit the Digital Design Museum on this website for Jonathan Ive's account of the development of each Apple product.
For more information on British design and architecture go to Design in Britain, the online archive run as a collaboration between the Design Museum and British Council, at designmuseum.org/designinbritain