Week+1

Jonathan Ive is the senior vice president of design at Apple Inc. Ives is responsible for the design of the iMac computer and iPod music player. Both of these products demonstrate Ive's particular form of design, known as undesign. Ive's theory of undesign relates to design that seems to have no thought put into its creation; in comparison to most design, undesign appears relatively simple. However, undesign is incredibly complex and difficult to perform properly because it must seem natural. That is to say, the design must seem almost obvious to a user. To accomplish this, Ive frequently uses techniques such as biomimicry in his designs. When he models his designs after nature (iMac shaped after a heliotropic sunflower, or the pulsing of a light timed on the Macbook to be the same as human breathing), he is using aspects of nature we are all accustomed to, in order to naturalize ourselves with the product. Furthermore, Ives has put a significant effort into creating products that are fully recyclable, by using materials such as aluminum in the Macbook air.