Jony Ive talks simplicity

Jony Ive, Apple’s Design SVP and Marc Newon, industrial designer, have given their touch to Sotheby’s charity action (RED) to battle aids in Africa. Some of their objects include aluminum clad-desk, a beautiful Leica M camera and a Mac-Pro in red color.

Both of them also appeared on Charlie Rose’s talk show to talk about how they interacted to come up with these items that are expected to be used by the higher bidders.

Ivy said in the interview.

Simplicity is refining and being able to define the very essence of what something does. And therefore you understand what it is, and you understand what it does. 

But simplicity for us is not just the absence of clutter, it’s not just stuff that’s not there – there’s this tremendous sort of gravity to trying to find the very, very simple solution.

And here’s a short version of the talk show, and the charity

Ivy also said that there were 55 Apple engineers who were involved in the process of one-off Leica camera, and the input was of 2,149 hours in total. The camera assembly took an engineer 50 hours.

“I found it a very odd and unusual thing to put this amount of love and energy into one thing, where you are only going to make one,” Ive said. “But isn’t it beautiful?”

Jony Ive’s bio book ‘Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products’ is available for $11.99 on iBooks, in case you’re interested in knowing more about this design genius.