Urban Planning & the Design of Communities
When history moves on
Such an enormous machine
The flash of a neon light
In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone
Beneath the halo of a streetlamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silenceMost cities were mostly built by improvisation
In Architecture Without Architects, Bernard Rudofsky documented the ways in which most cities were mostly built by improvisation, following no consistent formal design. Building was added to building, street to street, their forms adapting to different site conditions in the process of extension.
Rudofsky thought that this hidden order is how most settlements of poor people develop and that the work of improvising street order attaches people to their communities, whereas 'renewal' projects, which may provide a cleaner street, pretty houses, and large shops, give the inhabitants no way to mark their presence on the space.
The Help-Yourself City
Astoria Scum River Bridge. Photo by Jason Eppink.
There are lots of actions that skirt the boundary between “formal” and “informal” urbanism. In the last decade, there’s been a rise in tactical urbanism and guerrilla urbanism, where regular people make interventions in their communities. This ranges from hastily painted bike lanes, to do-it-yourself park benches in under-served communities.
The linear city
The linear city was an urban plan for an elongated urban formation. The city would consist of a series of functionally specialized parallel sectors.
As the city expanded, additional sectors would be added to the end of each band, so that the city would become ever longer, without growing wider.
The question of gentrification
The question of gentrification is made complex by the fact that the urban qualities it produces—lively street life, profuse commerce, preservation and upgrading of old buildings—are highly desirable, the substrate of urbanity. The problem with gentrification is with its particulars and with its effects.
Gentrification suppresses reciprocity by its narrowed scripting of formal and social behavior, by turning neighborhoods into Disneylands or Colonial Williamsburgs, where residents become cast members and the rituals of everyday life become spectacle or food for consumption.
Tactical urbanism
Tactical urbanism includes low-cost, temporary changes to the built environment, usually in cities, intended to improve local neighborhoods and city gathering places. Tactical urbanism is also commonly referred to as guerrilla urbanism, pop-up urbanism, city repair, or D.I.Y. urbanism.
The Street Plans Collaborative defines "tactical urbanism" as an approach to urban change that features the following five characteristics:
- A deliberate, phased approach to instigating change;
- The offering of local solutions for local planning challenges;
- Short-term commitment and realistic expectations;
- Low-risks, with a possibly high reward; and
- The development of social capital between citizens and the building of organizational capacity between public-private institutions, non-profits, and their constituents.
Doing community
There is a Japanese catchphrase, community suru, literally "making" or "doing" community. I will never forget the queasy feeling that came over me when I first heard that term, phrased as if community were a kind of event.
Hold an event, bring people together, get people who might otherwise never meet to interact. It's a wonderful thought. I have nothing against events per se. However, if they are not spontaneous and voluntary, they will not last. That is my objection to the keep-it-lively concept of community. The perception of community as event stems, I think, from a yearning for the festivals and rituals that once flourished in rural communities in Japan. But those events occurred precisely because a community existed, not the other way around.
highdensityandovercrowding
They hated both equally, in any case, and coupled them like ham and eggs, so that to this day housers and planners pop out the phrase as if it were one word, “highdensityandovercrowding.”
Such plans were deemed efficient
The terrain of cities was subdivided along the lines of distinct and discrete patterns of use, with very little opportunity for mixing (separation and concentration of functions). After all, the home environment should be just that…while places of work should be aggregated and serviced with their appropriate supporting functions.
Such plans were deemed efficient.
A World Where Things Only Almost Meet
Recall that great line from Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose
How beautiful the world would be if there were a procedure for moving through labyrinths.
Only, here, it’s some lonely postal worker—or a geography Ph.D. driven mad by student debt—out mapping the frayed edges of the world, wearily noting every new dead-end and cul-de-sac in a gridded notebook, diagramming loops, sketching labyrinths and mazes, driving empty streets all day on a quest for something undefinable, some answer to why the world’s patterns have gone so wrong. A self-diverging world, where things only almost meet.
Like the lines of a hand
The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand.
NIMBY, BANANA, NOPE
Waste-disposal facilities of all kinds—landfills, incinerators, even transfer stations—are sure bets for generating the NIMBY response: not in my backyard. In its most cynical form, NIMBY is the attitude of citizens who acknowledge the need for a facility, somewhere, but who oppose a plan for building it simply because the selected site is too close to their own property. But opposition to landfills and many other kinds of development goes well beyond cynical NIMBY. Another catch phrase for this phenomenon is BANANA: build absolutely nothing anywhere near anybody. Or else it's NOPE: not on planet earth.
In every skyscraper
In every skyscraper there is someone going mad.
Putting the streets to use
Tad Friend writes, if you build “nine hundred miles of sinuous highway and twenty-one thousand miles of tangled surface streets” in one city alone, then you’re going to find at least a few people who want to put those streets to use. This suggests that every city blooms with the kinds of crime most appropriate to its form.
All the things we want to do
This is precisely where “burglary” becomes a myth, a symbol, a metaphor: it stands in for all the things people really want to do with the built environment, what they really want to do to sidestep the obstacles of their lives.
The City of Light
Streetlights were one of many new patrol tools implemented by Louis XIV’s lieutenant general of police, Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie. De la Reynie’s plan ordered that lanterns be hung over the streets every sixty feet—with the unintended side effect that Paris soon gained its popular moniker, the City of Light. The world’s most romantic city takes its nickname from a police operation.
Designed to be ruins
I don't want to talk here about the grand designs of the past – the sort of thing one finds in majestic cities, in palaces and temples; the sorts of layouts that brought a friend of mine to sum up his first impression of Washington D.C. by saying, "The place seems to be designed to be ruins."
Holding together a civilization
It is only in the present age that it has been asserted that 'architecture is not an art' or 'should not be an art': and that strenuous efforts are made to made a distinction between design and art. And nowadays we build cities of such a quality that no one likes living in them, everyone who can do so gets a motor car to escape from them. Because of the multitude of motor cars, escape is now denied us, the country is destroyed, and the cities become still less tolerable to live in.
All that is the consequence of contempt for art. Art is not a matter of giving people a little pleasure in their time off. It is in the long run a matter of holding together a civilization.
Deliberate acts
I do not know what one should call the landscape of a long cultivated countryside, or the enchanting pattern of lights which shows at night time in a modern city seen from overhead. Are these not works of art? It is scarcely justifiable to say that these things have taken shape by chance. Each part of them has been made as it is by what seemed a deliberate act, and it need not necessarily be assumed to be a matter of chance that the results of many acts of many men over a considerably period of time should harmonize together aesthetically.
Walls and membranes
All living things contain two sites of resistance. These are cell walls and cell membranes. The cell wall is more purely exclusionary – a boundary; the membrane permits more fluid and solid exchange – a border.
Most pervasive in the modern city is the inert boundary established by highway traffic, cutting off parts of the city from each other. Working with resistance means, in urbanism, converting boundaries into borders.
Fabric
And finally, the things which seem like elements dissolve, and leave a fabric of relationships behind, which is the stuff that actually repeats itself, and gives the structure to a building or a town.
Warmed by the afternoon sun
Textbooks on water-system engineering state that supply mains are generally installed on the north side of the street in the Northern Hemisphere and on the south side in the Southern Hemisphere, so that the sun will warm them. In both hemispheres they are supposed to be on the east side of north-south streets, on the premise that the afternoon sun is warmer than the morning sun.
Trompe l'oeil fantasies
In residential neighborhoods some sewage-pumping stations are trompe l'oeil fantasies, dressed up to look like the split-level or colonial houses that surround them. If you look closely, it's not hard to spot these disguised pumphouses: the heavy-duty power connections, the big ventilating fans, and the diesel generator in the backyard are all tip-offs. Furthermore, the windows are often fakes, with sash and shutters adorning a blank wall.
Roads to nowhere
Among real-estate developers, straight lines and right angles went out of fashion sometime in the middle of the twentieth century. If you look at a town or a residential neighborhood laid out since then, you are more likely to find sinuous, serpentine roads—whether or not the topography offers any excuse for such curves. Many of these roads go nowhere: they are loops that bring you back to where you started, or they are cul-de-sacs. Making it easy to find your way through the network of streets is obviously not a high priority. This is an interesting development in urban geography: having redesigned the city to accommodate the automobile, we now search for ways to discourage people from driving on the streets.
Dead cities
If you can understand a city, then that city is dead.
Bridges as walls
The biographer of Robert Moses, Robert A. Caro, refers to the bridges and underpasses of the famed New York State parkways. These bridges and underpasses are quite low, intentionally specified by Moses to allow only private cars to pass. All those who traveled by bus because they were poor or black or both were barred from the use and enjoyment of the parkland and its "public amenities" by the technical design of the bridges. Even at the time of Robert Moses, a political statement of the form "We don't want them blacks in our parks" would have been unacceptable in New York State. But a technological expression of the same prejudice appeared to be all right. Of course, to the public the intent of the design became evident only after it was executed, and then the bridges were there.
NYLA
"See, what I've always liked about Los Angeles is that it's one of the least restrictive towns in the world. You can pretty much live any way you want to here. And part of that is because the place has no tradition and no history in that sense. It doesn't have any image of itself, which is exactly its loss and gain. That's why it's such a great place to do art and to build your ideas about culture. In New York, it's like an echo chamber: its overwhelming sense of itself, of its past and its present and its mission, becomes utterly restricting."
A system for living
Unlike the traditional neighborhood model, which evolved organically as a response to human needs, suburban sprawl is an idealized artificial system. It is not without a certain beauty: it is rational, consistent, and comprehensive. Its performance is largely predictable. It is an outgrowth of modern problem solving: a system for living. Unfortunately, this system is already showing itself to be unsustainable.
Globally, locally, regionally
Think globally, act locally, but plan regionally.
The Timeless Way of Building
A Book by Christopher Alexander- Mind of no mind
- The quality without a name
- An objective matter
- Bitterness
- The most precious thing we ever have
A Pattern Language
- Its place in the web of nature
- 9. Scattered Work
- 21. Four-Story Limit
- 51. Green Streets
- 53. Main Gateways
20 Minutes in Manhattan
A Book by Michael SorkinThe Death and Life of Great American Cities
A Book by Jane JacobsInfrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape
A Book by Brian HayesA City Is Not a Tree
An Essay by Christopher Alexander- Strands of life
- Impending destruction
- The right overlap
- The difficulty of designing complexity
- Political chains of influence
The Image of the City
A Book by Kevin Lynch- To become completely lost
- Apparency
- On the edge of something else
- Nothing there, after all
- Paths, edges, districts, nodes, landmarks
The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth
A Book by Christopher Alexander- Two generating systems
- Two types of building production
- System A
- System B
- This has harmed modern society greatly
Two Cycles
A Book by Toshiharu NakaGorgeous artwork by Minori Asada.
Soft City
A Book by David SimInvisible Cities
A Book by Italo CalvinoDesign of Cities
A Book by Edmund BaconThe Nature of Order
A Book by Christopher AlexanderA Burglar's Guide to the City
A Book by Geoff ManaughSuburban Nation
A Book by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk & Jeff SpeckHow Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster?
A Documentary by Norman FosterThe film traces the rise of one of the world's premier architects, Norman Foster, and his unending quest to improve the quality of life through design.
Against the survival of the prettiest
An Essay by Samuel HughesWhat has emerged here is that although survivorship bias probably does contribute to that to some extent, it is not the main explanation: premodern buildings may on average have been a bit less beautiful than those that have survived, but they still seem to have been ugly far less often than recent buildings are.
The survivorship theory sought to explain the apparent rise of ugliness in terms of a bias in the sample of buildings we are observing. There is another kind of bias theory, which seeks to explain it in terms of a bias in the observer, saying for instance that every generation is disposed to find recent buildings uglier than older ones, and that this is why recent buildings seem so to us. This is a complex and interesting idea, which I am not going to assess on this occasion. Suppose, though, that our eyes are to be trusted. If this is so, strange and eerie truths rise before us: that ugly buildings were once rare, that the ‘uglification of the world’ is real and that it is happening all around us.
Scales of cities, scales of software
An Article by Linus the SephistAmerican cities seem like a product of industrial processes where older European cities seem like a product of human processes. This is because most American cities were built after and alongside the car and the industrial revolution – the design of cities took into account what was easily possible, and that guided the shape and scale of everything.
Software has similar analogues. There are software codebases that feel much more industrially generated than hand written, and they’re usually written in automation-rich environments fitting into frameworks and other orchestrating code.
…But despite the availability of cars, I still much prefer the scale and ambiance of European, human-scale cities, because ultimately cities are places humans must inhabit and understand. In the same way, I still much prefer the scale and ambiance of hand-written codebases even in the presence of heavy programming tooling, because ultimately codebases are places humans must inhabit.
Situationist Theses on Traffic
An Essay by Guy DebordA small store
A Gallery by Kyeoung Me LeeWorking with Brian Eno on design principles for streets
- Think like a gardener, not an architect: design beginnings, not endings
- Unfinished = fertile
- Artists are to cities what worms are to soil.
- A city’s waste should be on public display.
- Make places that are easy for people to change and adapt (wood and plaster, as opposed to steel and concrete.)
- Places which accommodate the very young and the very old are loved by everybody else too.
- Low rent = high life
- Make places for people to look at each other, to show off to each other.
- Shared public space is the crucible of community.
- A really smart city is the one that harnesses the intelligence and creativity of its inhabitants.
Walk Appeal
An Article by Steve MouzonWalk Appeal promises to be a major new tool for understanding and building walkable places, and it explains several things that were heretofore either contradictory or mysterious. It begins with the assertion that the quarter-mile radius (or 5-minute walk,) which has been held up for a century as the distance Americans will walk before driving, is actually a myth.
Both images below are at the same scale, and the yellow dashed line is a quarter-mile radius. On the left is a power center. As we all know, if you're at Best Buy and need to pick something up at Old Navy, there's no way you're walking from one store to another. Instead, you get in your car and drive as close as possible to the Old Navy front door. You'll even wait for a parking space to open up instead of driving to an open space just a few spaces away… not because you're lazy, but because it's such a terrible walking experience.
The image on the right is Rome. The circles are centered on the Piazza del Popolo (North is to the left) and the Green radius goes through the Vittorio Emanuele on the right. People regularly walk that far and then keep on walking without ever thinking of driving.
Drawing pictures of cities
An Article by Noah SmithThis is a famous picture by the artist Imperial Boy (帝国少年), who works in the anime industry. I sometimes claim that the entire genre of solarpunk is simply a riff on this picture.
If it’s not just “trees on buildings”, where does the Imperial Boy picture get its magic? Looking at it carefully and trying to analyze what I like about it, I think that much of it is about architecture, and even more of it is about the use of urban space — about how the structures in the picture shape the kinds of things you’d do if you were there. For example, here are five things I like:
- Open, walkable multi-level retail
- River with low bank
- Walkable streets
- Varied architecture
- Shade
Towers in the Village
An Essay by Alfred TwuSince tall buildings have been around, there have been many ways they’ve fit into cities: towers in downtown, towers in the park, and most recently, towers on a whole-block development. Let’s look at a 4th way, the Tower in the Village.
Unlike the others, the Tower in the Village does not aim to be the center of attention. Instead, the upper floors are hidden behind a low front that fits in with the rest of the block. It faces a village green instead of a busy road.
Why highrise infill? Growing cities have two choices: 1) Redevelop a lot of sites to medium density, or 2) Redevelop a small number of sites to very high density. Highrise infill requires less demolition and can get more homes built faster.
Human-scale digital spaces
An Article by Alexis LloydThe open web is much like emergent, unplanned cities — it happens at the scale of the individual, it allows for unexpected creativity, it gives agency to anyone (well, anyone with sufficient technical knowledge) to shape their own spaces. On the other hand, the platforms that now dominate much of the web experience are more evocative of Moses’s planned cities—they often occur at the scale of the corporation, and have rigid, predictable constraints for how individuals can behave and express themselves.
Semi-detached houses, 2019
A GalleryImages by Wolfgang Fröhling. Linked via kottke.org.
With the beginning of the exit from mining, the colliery apartments were gradually privatized. The houses, in which several families used to live, were divided into two semi-detached houses. At some point the new owners began - each for himself - to design their property. The result was a curious mix of styles in the semi-detached house.
Clues for software design in how we sketch maps of cities
An Article by Matt WebbGiven there’s an explosion in software to accrete and organise knowledge, is the page model really the best approach?
Perhaps the building blocks shouldn’t be pages or blocks, but
neighbourhoods
roads
rooms and doors
landmarks.Or rather, as a knowledge base or wiki develops, it should - just like a real city - encourage its users to gravitate towards these different fundamental elements. A page that starts to function a little bit like a road should transform into a slick navigation element, available on all its linked pages. A page which is functioning like a landmark should start being visible from two hops away.
A Need to Walk
An Essay by Craig ModWalking intrigues the deskbound. We romanticize it, but do we do it justice? Do we walk properly? Can one walk improperly and, if so, what happens when the walk is corrected?
Off the Grid...and Back Again?
An Article by Geoff BoeingMy article “Off the Grid… and Back Again? The Recent Evolution of American Street Network Planning and Design” has been published by the Journal of the American Planning Association and won the 2020 Stough-Johansson Springer Award for best paper. It identifies recent nationwide trends in American street network design, measuring how urban planners abandoned the grid and embraced sprawl over the 20th century, but since 2000 these trends have rebounded, shifting back toward historical design patterns.
The 99% Invisible City
A Book by Roman Mars & Kurt KohlstedtPsychogeography
A Definition by Guy DebordPsychogeography is an exploration of urban environments that emphasizes playfulness and "drifting". It was defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as:
- "The study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals."
- "A total dissolution of boundaries between art and life."
- "A whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities...just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape."
New Public Sites
A Place by Graham Coreil-AllenNew Public Sites walking tours explore the history, design and uses of public spaces. Through walking tours, maps and videos, Public Artist Graham Coreil-Allen pushes pedestrian agency, interprets aspects of the everyday and investigates the negotiable nature of the built environment. New Public Sites invites you to practice “radical pedestrianism” – traveling by foot through infinite sites of freedom while testing the limits of and redefining public space.
Local Code: 3,659 Proposals About Data, Design & The Nature of Cities
A Book by Nicholas de MonchauxLocal Code’s data-driven layout arranges drawings of 3,659 digitally tailored interventions for vacant public land in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, and Venice, Italy. The natures of these found parcels is as particular as the cities that house them — land under billboards in Los Angeles, dead-end alleys in San Francisco, city-owned vacant lots in New York City, and abandoned islands in the Venetian lagoon — but have in common an unrecognized potential as a social and ecological resource.
New Urbanism and Beyond: Designing Cities for the Future
A Book by Tigran HaasReading Design
A WebsiteReading Design is an online archive of critical writing about design. The idea is to embrace the whole of design, from architecture and urbanism to product, fashion, graphics and beyond. The texts featured here date from the nineteenth century right up to the present moment but each one contains something which remains relevant, surprising or interesting to us today.
All the buildings in New York (that I've drawn so far)
Steve Jobs
You'll know it's there
Jobs's father had once taught him that a drive for perfection meant caring about the craftsmanship even of the parts unseen. Jobs applied that to the layout of the circuit board inside the Apple II. He rejected the initial design because the lines were not straight enough.
In an interview a few years later, after the Macintosh came out, Jobs again reiterated that lesson from his father: "When you're a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you're not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You'll know it's there, so you're going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through."
The Apple Marketing Philosophy
Markkula wrote his principles in a one-page paper titled "The Apple Marketing Philosophy" that stressed three points.
The first was empathy, an intimate connection with the feelings of the customer: "We will truly understand their needs better than any other company."
The second was focus: "In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities."
The third and equally important principle, awkwardly named, was impute. It emphasized that people form an opinion about a company or product based on the signals that it conveys. "People DO just a book by its cover," he wrote. "We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software etc.; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities."
Not just in the details
There falls a shadow, as T.S. Eliot noted, between the conception and the creation. In the annals of innovation, new ideas are only part of the equation. Execution is just as important.
The improvements [over Xerox] were in not just the details but the entire concept. The mouse at Xerox PARC could not be used to drag a window around the screen. Apple's engineers devised an interface so you could not only drag windows and files around, you could even drop them into folders. The Xerox system required you to select a command in order to do anything...the Apple system transformed the desktop metaphor into virtual reality by allowing you to directly touch, manipulate, drag, and relocate things. And Apple's engineers worked in tandem with its designers to improve the desktop concept by adding delightful icons and menus that pulled down from a bar atop each window and the capability to open files and folders with a double click.
An icon is a symbol equally incomprehensible in all human languages
An icon is a symbol equally incomprehensible in all human languages. There's a reason why humans invented phonetic languages.
If it could save a person's life, would you find a way to make it faster?
"If it could save a person's life, would you find a way to shave ten seconds off the boot time?" [Jobs] asked. Kenyon allowed that he probably could. Jobs went to a whiteboard and showed that if there were five million people using the Max, and it took ten seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to three hundred million or so hours per year that people would save, which was the equivalent of at least one hundred lifetimes saved per year. "Larry was suitably impressed, and a few weeks later he came back and it booted up twenty-eight seconds faster," Atkinson recalled. "Steve had a way of motivating by looking at the bigger picture."
We might as well make them beautiful
The Macintosh team came to share Jobs's passion for making a great product, not just a profitable one. "Jobs thought of himself as an artist, and he encouraged the design team to think of ourselves that way too," said Hertzfeld. "The goal was never to beat the competition, or even to make a lot of money. It was the do the greatest thing possible, or even a little greater." He once took the team to see an exhibit of Tiffany glass at the Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan because he believed they could learn from Louis Tiffany's example of creating great art that could be mass-produced. Recalled Bud Tribble, "We said to ourselves, 'Hey, if we're going to make things in our lives, we might as well make them beautiful.'"
Models and iterations
Every month or so, Manock and Oyama would present a new iteration based on Jobs's previous criticisms. The latest plaster model would be dramatically unveiled, and all the previous attempts would be lined up next to it. That not only helped them gauge the design's evolution, but it prevented Jobs from insisting that one of his suggestions had been ignored.
For a computer to be friendly
Even though Steve didn't draw any of the lines, his ideas and inspiration made the design what it is. To be honest, we didn't know what it meant for a computer to be 'friendly' until Steve told us.
It's not just a little thing
At one point Kare and Atkinson complained that he was making them spend too much time on tiny little tweaks to the title bar when they had bigger things to do. Jobs erupted. "Can you imagine looking at that every day?" he shouted. "It's not just a little thing, it's something we have to do right."
Real artists sign their work
When the design was finally locked in, Jobs called the Macintosh team together for a ceremony. "Real artists sign their work," he said. So he got out a sheet of drafting paper and a Sharpie pen and had all of them sign their names. The signatures were engraved inside each Macintosh.
Whole widgets
Jobs believed that for a computer to be truly great, its hardware and its software had to be tightly linked. When a computer was open to running software that also worked on other computers, it would end up sacrificing some functionality. The best products, he believed, were "whole widgets" that were designed end-to-end, with the software closely tailored to the hardware and vice versa.
A ripple through the universe
As every day passes, the work fifty people are doing here is going to send a giant ripple through the universe. I know I might be a little hard to get along with, but this is the most fun thing I've done in my life.
Customers don't know what they want
At the end of the presentation someone asked whether he thought they should do some market research to see what customers wanted. "No," he replied, "because customers don't know what they want until we've shown them." Then he pulled out a device that was about the size of a desk diary. "Do you want to see something neat?" When he flipped it open, it turned out to be a mock-up of a computer that could fit in your lap, with a keyboard and a screen hinged together like a notebook. "This is my dream of what we will be making in the mid- to late eighties," he said. They were building a company that would invent the future.
All sorts of ways to use the machine
Jobs wanted to sell Pixar's computers to a mass market, so he had the Pixar folks open up sales offices—for which he approved the design—in major cities, on the theory that creative people would soon come up with all sorts of ways to use the machine. "My view is that people are creative animals and will figure out clever new ways to use tools that the inventor never imagined."
One keyboard at a time
His frustration with Apple was evident when he gave a talk to a Stanford Business School club at the home of a student, who asked him to sign a Macintosh keyboard. Jobs agreed to do so if he could remove the keys that had been added to the Mac after he left. He pulled out his car keys and pried off the four arrow cursor keys, which he had once banned, as well as the top row of F1, F2, F3 ... function keys. "I'm changing the world one keyboard at a time," he deadpanned. Then he signed the mutilated keyboard.
Think Different.
They debated the grammatical issue: If "different" was supposed to modify the verb "think," it should be an adverb, as in "think differently." But Jobs insisted that he wanted "different" to be used as a noun, as in "think victory" or "think beauty." Also, it echoed colloquial use, as in "think big." Jobs later explained, "We discussed whether it was correct before we ran it. It's grammatical, if you think about what we're trying to say. It's not think the same, it's think different. Think a little different, think a lot different, think different. 'Think differently' wouldn't hit the meaning for me"
Ban PowerPoints
One of the first things Jobs did during the product review process was ban PowerPoints. "I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking," Jobs later recalled. "People would confront a problem by creating a presentation. I wanted them to engage, to hash things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides. People who know what they're talking about don't need PowerPoint."
Which ones do I tell my friends to buy?
The product review revealed how unfocused Apple had become. The company was churning out multiple versions of each product because of bureaucratic momentum and to satisfy the whims of retailers..."I had people explaining this to me for three weeks," Jobs said. "I couldn't figure it out." He finally began asking simple questions, like, "Which ones do I tell my friends to buy?"
When he couldn't get simple answers, he began slashing away at models and products. Soon he had cut 70% of them..."I came out of the meeting with people who had just gotten their products canceled and they were three feet off the ground with excitement because they finally understood where in the heck we were going."
After a few weeks Jobs finally had enough. "Stop!" he shouted at one big product strategy session. "This is crazy." He grabbed a magic marker, padded to a whiteboard, and drew a horizontal and vertical line to make a four-squared chart. "Here's what we need," he continued. Atop the two columns he wrote "Consumer" and "Pro"; he labeled the two rows "Desktop" and "Portable." Their job, he said, was to make four great products, one for each quadrant. "The room was in dumb silence," Schiller recalled.
That feeling of putting care into a product
I always understood the beauty of things made by hand. I came to realize that what was really important was the care that was put into it. What I really despise is when I sense some carelessness in a product.
Unlike some designers, [Ive] didn't just make beautiful sketches; he also focused on how the engineering and inner components would work.
He became head of [the design department at Apple] in 1996, the year before jobs returned, but wasn't happy. Amelio had little appreciation for design.
There wasn't that feeling of putting care into a product, because we were trying to maximize the money we made. All they wanted from us designers was a model of what something was supposed to look like on the outside, and then engineers would make it as cheap as possible. I was about to quit.
To be truly simple
Why do we assume that simple is good? Because with physical products, we have to feel we can dominate them. As you bring order to complexity, you find a way to make the product defer to you. Simplicity isn't just a visual style. It's not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. For example, to have no screws on something you can end up having a product that is so convoluted and so complex. The better way is to go deeper with the simplicity, to understand everything about it and how it's manufactured. You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.
Total collaboration
The process of designing a product at Apple was integrally related to how it would be engineered and manufactured. Ive described one of Apple's Power Macs. "We wanted to get rid of anything other than what was absolutely essential," he said. "To do so required total collaboration between the designers, the product developers, the engineers, and the manufacturing team. We kept going back to the beginning, again and again. Do we need that part? Can we get it to perform the function of the other four parts?"
Pure and seamless
The connection between the design of a product, its essence, and its manufacturing was illustrated for Jobs and Ive when they were traveling in France and went into a kitchen supply store. Ive picked up a knife he admired, but then put it down in disappointment. Jobs did the same. "We both noticed a tiny bit of glue between the handle and the blade," Ive recalled. They talked about how the knife's good design had been ruined by the way it was manufactured. "We don't like to think of our knives as being glued together," Ive said. "Steve and I care about things like that, which ruin the purity and detract from the essence of something like a utensil, and we think alike about how products should be made to look pure and seamless."
When we make a model and realize it's rubbish
Much of the design process is a conversation, a back-and-forth as we walk around the tables and play with the models. He doesn't like to read complex drawings. He wants to see and feel a model. He's right. I get surprised when we make a model and then realize it's rubbish, even though based on the CAD renderings it looked great.
He loves coming in here because it's calm and gentle. It's a paradise if you're a visual person. There are no formal design reviews, so there are no huge decision points. Instead we can make the presentations fluid. Since we iterate every day and never have dumb-ass presentations, we don't run into major disagreements.
A ritual of unpacking
I love the process of unpacking something. You design a ritual of unpacking to make the product feel special. Packaging can be theater, it can create a story.
The iMac
Ive and his team worked with Apple's Korean manufacturers to perfect the process of making the cases, and they even went to a jelly bean factory to study how to make translucent colors look enticing. The cost of each case was more than $60 per unit, three times that of a regular computer case. Other companies would probably have demanded presentations and studies to show whether the translucent case would increase sales enough to justify the extra cost. Jobs asked for no such analysis.
Topping off the design was the handle nestled into the iMac. It was more playful and semiotic than it was functional. This was a desktop computer; not many people were really going to carry it it around. But as Ive later explained:
Back then, people weren't comfortable with technology. If you're scared of something, then you won't touch it. I could see my mum being scared to touch it. So I thought, if there's this handle on it, it makes a relationship possible. It's approachable. It's intuitive. It gives you permission to touch. It gives a sense of deference to you.
We'll slap a little color on this piece of junk
"The one thing Apple's providing now is leadership in colors," Gates said as he pointed to a Windows-based PC that he jokingly had painted red. "It won't take long for us to catch up with that, I don't think."
Jobs was furious, and he told a reporter that Gates, the man he had publicly decried for being completely devoid of taste, was clueless about what made the iMac so much more appealing than other computers. "The thing that our competitors are missing is they think it's about fashion, and they think it's about surface appearance," he said. "They said, We'll slap a little color on this piece of junk computer, and we'll have one, too."
The Apple Store
"Ron [Johnson] thinks we've got it all wrong. He thinks [the Apple store] should be organized not around products but instead around what people do." There was a pause, then Jobs continued. "And you know, he's right." He said they would redo the layout, even though it would likely delay the planned January rollout by three or four months. "We've only got one chance to get it right."
Jobs liked to tell the story—and he did so to his team that day—about how everything he had done correctly had required a moment when he hit the rewind button. In each case he had to rework something that he discovered was not perfect.
The iPod
Suddenly everything had fallen into place: a drive that would hold a thousand songs; and interface and scroll wheel that would let you navigate a thousand songs; a FireWire connection that could sync a thousand songs in under ten minutes; and a battery that would last through a thousand songs.
"We suddenly were looking at one another and saying, 'This is going to be so cool,'" Jobs recalled. "We knew how cool it was, because we knew how badly we each wanted one personally."
Cannibalize yourself
Like many companies, Sony worried about cannibalization. If it built a music player and service that made it easy for people to share digital songs, that might hurt sales of its record division. One of Jobs's business rules was to never be afraid of cannibalizing yourself. "If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will."
The job of art is to chase ugliness away
Bono later explained that not all corporate sponsorships were deals with the devil.
The 'devil' here is a bunch of creative minds, more creative than a lot of people in rock bands. The lead singer is Steve Jobs. These men have helped design the most beautiful art object in music culture since the electric guitar. That's the iPod. The job of art is to chase ugliness away.
The right kind of building can do great things for a culture
"Steve had this firm belief that the right kind of building can do great things for a culture," said Pixar's president Ed Catmull.
Despite being a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all too well its isolating potential, Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face meetings. "There's a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat," he said. "That's crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they're doing, you said 'Wow,' and soon you're cooking up all sorts of ideas."
When our tools are broken, we feel broken
In his piece [for Time] Lev Grossman correctly noted that the iPhone did not really invent many new features, it just made those features a lot more usable. "But that's important. When our tools don't work, we tend to blame ourselves, for being too stupid or not reading the manual or having too-fat fingers...When our tools are broken, we feel broken. And when somebody fixes one, we feel a tiny bit more whole."
Scoop it up and whisk it away
At one point Jobs looked at the model [for the first iPad] and was slightly dissatisfied. It didn't feel casual and friendly enough, so that you would naturally scoop it up and whisk it away. Ive put his finger, so to speak, on the problem: They needed to signal that you could grab it with one hand, on impulse. The bottom edge needed to be slightly rounded, so that you'd feel comfortable just scooping it up rather than lifting it carefully.
A pedestrian cloak
Even before the iPad went on sale, Jobs was thinking about what should be in the iPad 2...there was a peripheral issue that he focused on that most people hadn't thought about: The cases that people used covered the beautiful lines of the iPad and detracted from the screen. They made fatter what should be thinner. They put a pedestrian cloak on a device that should be magical in all of its aspects.
To read things that are not yet on the page
My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated the make great products. Everything else was secondary...the products, not the profits, were the motivation.
Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.
Click
I'm about fifty-fifty on believing in God. For most of my life, I've felt that there must be more to our existence than meets the eye.
I like to think that something survives after you die. It's strange to think that you accumulate all this experience, and maybe a little wisdom, and that it just goes away. So I really want to believe that something survives, that maybe your consciousness endures.
But on the other hand, perhaps it's like an on-off switch. Click! And you're gone.
...Maybe that's why I never liked to put on-off switches on Apple devices.