Get Design Out of the Way

Two quotes about design from Jony Ive in Wallpaper’s piece on the new Apple Campus caught my attention.

As a design team our goal has been, in some ways, to get design out of the way. We try to define a solution that seems so inevitable that it does recede.Jony Ive

This is exactly how we designers should think. It’s easy to be seduced by the clever and the shiny, yet our work should be making life easier, better and more fruitful, then get out of the way. That’s not to say that beauty doesn’t have a place, but it should not overpower function.

Second, he also nails why I love working in product design over marketing:

When I look back over the last 25 years, in some ways what seems most precious is not what we have made but how we have made it and what we have learned as a consequence of that. I always think that there are two products at the end of a programme; there is the physical product or the service, the thing that you have managed to make, and then there is all that you have learned. The power of what you have learned enables you to do the next thing and it enables you to do the next thing better. Jony Ive

Design your processes just as you do the work it creates.