Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Steve Jobs


When I started using my first I-Mac I felt a intelligence that mirrored/paralleled/anticipated the human brain - or at least my own brain. I wanted to relate to it, I wanted to learn with it, I looked forward to using it...just like I looked forward to designing and making my own creative work...it became my friend, my companion...and so the entire line of Apple products have become every user’s friend and companion...after twenty years and now writing on my titanium with five or six other mac products in between…here is what I know.

Steve Jobs was the quintessential architect. He tilled that elusive ground between humanity, vision and technology to make places that related, inspired and worked. I use the word “places” because his products have a sensuous corporeal presence worthy of a relationship. That he was able to turn product after product into places we wanted to hang out in is evidence he was working from a place that captured the essence of not only of an era but of the human condition.

His vision became the vision of so many across the globe because what he saw was a renewed way of connecting human beings to the world in which we live. He was able to deliver that vision to each and every individual user because he understood, felt and believed that humans are sensate animals who react to phenomenal messaging.

Apple’s products reveal the synchronicities between those aspects of human endeavor that hitherto seemed dichotomous i.e. beauty, efficiency, intelligence, intuition, creativity, reliability, technology, sensuality... they teach us that all these are human aspirations and that we do not have to give up a single one of them to achieve the others. Only when we are able to hold and deliver on all of them simultaneously do we have a chance of producing something of lasting meaning and value with a potential to inspire others. Beyond facilitating our own creativity, his products/places inspire us to have fun doing it and to integrate as we glide through their use.

In an era of mind boggling and ethereal digital technology and in which reality is ever more elusive is it at all surprising that we latch on to and caress the beautiful physical objects that are our entry point to and continually connects us to that ethereal world? Their sensual skin, the screen’s infinite color range as versatile as nature itself, the buffered sound of the keyboard, not to mention the intuitive magic of the operating system, all these physical attributes recognize that where man-made objects meet the user an inevitable sensual “relationship” is created. Steve Jobs recognized this and tapped every resource at his disposal to achieve the highest degree of connection with each user. Beyond the trendy look, he turned each product into a place in the life for the user. That quest is architecture at its purest and Steve Jobs was at the pinnacle. 
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image courtesy of Chris Thornley / Jonathan Mak Long