Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels famously encourages his staff to work crazy hours because, he maintains, people tend to be most creative and most fearless when they’re deliriously tired. Dye and the human interface crew had to rethink every interaction, every animation, every function. “We were literally living in the design studio,” Dye says, “a small group of us, working on iOS 7.” The seventh iteration of the iPhone’s operating system, iOS 7 was much more than a redesign of smartphone and tablet software: It was an inflection point at the company, marking the ascendance of Jony Ive to the throne atop all Apple design. At the time, they were in the midst of a marathon push to overhaul Apple’s mobile operating system. He soon brought the idea to Dye and a small group of others in the design studio. Ive began dreaming about an Apple watch just after CEO Steve Jobs’ death in October 2011. After working in Apple’s marketing division, helping design the company’s now-iconic product boxes, Dye was handed the reins to the human interface group. He came to Apple in 2006 with a résumé that included stints as design director at fashion house Kate Spade and as a heavy hitter at Ogilvy & Mather doing branding work for the likes of Miller and Levi’s. Those cool little experiences you have with your laptop and phone and tablet, like when the app icons quiver because they’re ready to move around your screen? That’s the human interface team.Ī graphic designer by training, Dye is much more Burberry than BlackBerry: With his hair swept deliberately to the left and a Japanese pen clipped to the inside of his gingham shirt just so, he’s clearly not leaving any details to chance. As chief of Apple’s human interface group, he’s in charge of creating the ways you tell your device what to do and how that device responds. The interface would determine whether the Watch ended up displayed in a dozen museums or remembered as Apple’s biggest flop since the Newton. But one thing was clear from the start: The Watch would succeed or fail on the strength of what’s prosaically called the user interface. The purpose of the wrist-mounted technology, what problems it might solve-that was something the Watch team would come up with slowly, during the process of inventing a bunch of new ways to interact with the device. Expectations and scrutiny would be impossibly high the watch had to be, in the company’s parlance, insanely great.Īlan Dye is the designer in charge of how we interact with Apple devices. This was to be the next step in a dynasty-the first without the guidance of Steve Jobs. The iPad brought tablets in from the fringes, blowing past years of work by the likes of Nokia and Microsoft. The iPhone transformed the smartphone from business gear into pop culture. There were MP3 players before the iPod, but Apple made you want one. After all, over the past 15 years, Apple has upended three major categories of consumer electronics and, in the process, become the most valuable company on Earth. It was either hubris or an entirely justifiable expectation. The expectations, however, were clear: Apple’s senior vice president of design, Jony Ive, had tasked them with creating a revolutionary device that could be worn on the wrist. There were just experiments-the iPod crew had made something with a click wheel-and lots of ideas. There were no working prototypes there was no software. There was a design review in two days, he was told, with the Apple brass. He could learn about his 401(k) later.Īs soon as he walked into the studio, he found out the project he’d been hired to run was already on deadline. His boss at the time, hardware czar Bob Mansfield, said to head straight to the design studio and get to work. When he showed up at 1 Infinite Loop on his first day, he was instructed to skip the usual new-employee orientation. Lynch had a lot to prove-and, apparently, a lot to do. Kevin Lynch was responsible for turning the Watch from an idea into a product.
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