Steve Jobs Apple CEO
Apple CEO Steve Jobs (1955 – 2011) at the Apple Conference June 8 2010, in talking about the new Apple iPhone 4 to be launched later that month, made a point at the end of his dissertation, of letting his followers and developers know just how Apple products were a fusion of the Liberal Arts, (the Humanities), with Technology.
In light of our last post about the Call to Action by American Philosopher Martha C Nussbaum re the return of the humanities to university curriculum’s, Job’s comments revealed there was a very real need by Jobs and his team to believe that Apple, as a corporation, were contributing to the shaping and moulding of contemporary western civilization through their products.
Claudine Beaumont, Reviewer of the iPhone 4 for the Daily Telegraph in the UK said ‘iPhone’s industrial styling, squared off edges and brutish combination of stainless steel and glass create a gadget that feels at once both luxurious and practical; it is design in the purest sense, with every material serving a specific purpose’.
The New Apple iPhone 4 comes into the public domain through the genius of a whole team of talented technology developers, but the simplicity and sleek design is that of one man, award winning English industrial designer Jonathon Ive CBE, who has headed the Industrial Design team responsible for most of the company’s significant hardware products since Steve Jobs returned to the Apple Corporation as its CEO in 1997.
Teapot Christopher Dresser 1879 James Dixon Sheffield Victoria & Albert Museum, London
Ive joins the ranks of another of the world’s greatest industrial designers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Englishman Christopher Dresser, who was one of the gurus at the core of the advent of the arts movement now known as Modernism.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the economic and social forces, which underpinned mid-Victorian stability were shattered, Britain’s manufacturing power was threatened by rivals America, Germany and Japan and at home by industrial unrest. Growing feminist and socialist movements characterize this period as one of general and protracted crisis.
At the time the population of the United Kingdom was 41.5 million in 1901, twenty percent living in poverty. Emmelline Pankhurst founded the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1903 and it became a focus for militant action in the campaign for women’s suffrage and the Children’s act of 1904 finally banned employment of children between 9:00 pm and 6:00 am
The movements in art at this time are all considered aspects of what is currently known as Modernism. However confusion it seems still persists over the precise meaning of modern, moderne, modernist, modernism and contemporary as applied to art, architecture and design. The art community has adopted the term in recent years to describe the diverse range of architectural and decorative styles, as well as applied and graphic arts created between 1880 and 1940.
The progression of some of the main movements commonly associated with modernism are; Arts and Crafts 1875-1915, which had British, American and Australian phases. Art Nouveau (1880-1910) European and American phases; Wiener Werkstatte (1903-1933 Bauhaus (1919-1933) Art Deco (1920-1940) in its European and American phases.
Ive & Jobs with the flirty iMac
We could say that ‘Wassily Kadinsky was caught between Dame Nature and Dame Imagination’, said artist Pierre Antoine Gallien who began his career in the applied arts at that time when technical innovation promoted by world exhibitions were the harbingers of ecological building with new materials and methods of construction leading the way to transparency and lightness of construction.
From the emergence of the British Arts and Crafts Movement late in the nineteenth century until the outbreak of the Second World War a new international modernist design vocabulary gradually emerged.
Christopher Dresser was the first to produce work void of external ornamentation but with severe lines, where, with the minimum use of materials, form and decoration became secondary to the presence of the substance, and where the actual function of the object stood in logical relation to the design. The result was a formal discipline, which has echoed through the designs of the twentieth century and is now revived spectacularly in the twenty first century with the austere aesthetic genius of designer Jonathon Ive at Apple.
Jonathon Ive is internationally renowned as the principal designer of the iMac, aluminum and titanium PowerBook G4, MacBook, unibody MacBook Pro, iPod, iPhone, and iPad. What a portfolio.
Carolyn McDowall June 9 2010
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