Aesthetic Note:
The Design of Modern Machines
25 February 2015

Last night, I read Ian Parker’s profile of Sir Jonathan Ive, in the current issue of The New Yorker. Ive wears his knighthood lightly enough to be known either by his last name or by “Jony” — surely “Jonny” would have been preferable? He is in charge of design at Apple, which makes him a very important person indeed, the fons et origo, now that Steve Jobs is gone, of Apple’s spectacular valuation. I had never heard of him.

In the accompanying photograph of half of Ive’s stubbly face, the designer vaguely resembles a friend of mine, and I had great fun imagining my friend in Ive’s shoes, or, more exactly, in the back of his luxurious Bentley, sighing “Oh, my God” when learning that a colleague drives a Camry. My friend, you see, reads Monocle. He still reads Monocle. In case you haven’t seen it, Monocle serves readers who believe that the key to paradise will be turned when everyone is finally drinking perfectly-brewed espresso from the perfect teacup. My friend does not believe this, but I think he would like to.

The usual New Yorker profile ends by leaving you feeling that you know all that you want to know, thank you very much, about the subject. Not so this one. It is possible that Ive has learned something from aesthetes of the past: talking about your refined sensibilities makes you look ridiculous. So he will not tell us what books he reads or what movies he watches. What is it like to see the world as he does? He can’t say. He can’t say more than that talking about how he feels is very hard for him. So we cannot linger over the person of Sir Jonathan Ive, much as Parker’s persistent buzz tries to hold our attention. We drift over Ive’s smooth, understated edges (stubble notwithstanding — another puzzle) and on to the consideration of excellent design, which, as everyone knows, is what makes Apple products so desirable.

Aside from my iPhone, which I bought in order to be able to have FaceTime chats with my daughter and her family when they moved to San Francisco, and a clutch of iPods, I own no Apple products. I gave my iPad to my grandson when he left town — and I had already given him one when iPads first appeared. To me, the design of an Apple product — and I’m talking about the way it works now, not what it looks like — is repellent. It reminds me of the French, whom I do not find repellent at all, because their conviction that there is one right way to do everything is the product of generations of trial and error. Apple’s convictions in this regard must obviously spring from a much shallower well of experience, and in fact Apple’s operating conventions strike me as having very little experience behind them at all. Perhaps it would be better to say that they reflect the rather narrow experience of very intelligent men who happen to be fascinated by the machinery of automobiles.

Sir Jonathan comes by his wizardry as naturally as possible: his great- and grandfather were precision metal workers, and his father a teacher of engineering. He was a prodigy in his youth; Apple snapped him up about twenty years ago. He would have left Cupertino not long afterward, but then Steve Jobs came back to head the company, and he and Ive clicked as few colleagues have clicked in this sublunary world.

The profile, in case you were wondering why The New Yorker was given access to Apple designers who have never spoken to journalists before, appears to be occasioned by the impending release of the Apple Watch. This will be the first big post-Jobs release, and without Jobs’ dark-side charisma to introduce it, Tim Cook is being resourceful.

***

I have only two things to say about design. First, nothing really good-looking has appeared since 1939. Second, I have never adopted the modernist belief that there is virtue — or even interest — in a machine’s good looks. Not being a spiritual person to begin with, I am not uplifted by the shine and swell of a piece of metal. The only emotional effects that appliances can have on me are negative. An ugly thing is regrettable, certainly; but as the ugliness is corrected and made to disappear, so does the object itself. My ideal machine does its job somewhere out of sight. Machines that we have to use — computers, stand mixers — ought to be stowed out of sight when we’re not using them.

Do I hate machines? No. But I know how dangerous they are. Their speed, their regularity, their reliability, their sheer obedience — these can be intoxicating characteristics, in comparison with which human beings might well be dismissed as, well, very poorly designed. Ever since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, there have been movements aplenty to reduce human beings to bits of machinery. We seem to have been unable to design workplaces for human beings — to conceive of the display and exercise of responsibility in non-mechanical terms. Although we understand that a great team, in any line of endeavor, is a collaborative commitment of variously-gifted people, we treat larger, more stratified groups as so much undifferentiated mass, incapable of self-direction; and we punish the human beings who stick out from it (ie, the variously-gifted).

The modern machine is an appliance that helps us to do things that are difficult, dangerous, or simply impossible by merely human means. We have not been living with modern machines for very long, roughly two and a half centuries. Until very recently, our response to the modern machine was the unreflective impulse to be wowed. Critical understanding does not go very far back. Only in my lifetime, for example, have numbers of human beings awoken to the possibility that our way of using modern machinery is endangering, and might even destroy, our planet’s ability to sustain life. (And of course the immediate response to that has been a splashing, unhelpful panic.) Meanwhile, there are more cars than ever, and if the ads that were shown during the Academy Awards presentation the other night are any indication, heaven on earth may be at hand as soon as cars come equipped with their very own drones, filming you from above while you drive along mountain highways. (The heaven part comes in when you drive off a cliff because you couldn’t take your eyes off the little movie of your own car being driven by you.) The idea that well-designed machines are endowed with salvific potency is very much with us.

But do think about it. Every time you make use of some cool gadget, are you hoping to be more of a machine yourself? If so, my counsel is: give it up. It never works. You’ll never work. Not like that gadget.