The Apple of his eye

DESIGN:Apple's design chief Jonathan Ive is not a household name – but an exhibition in Hamburg aims to put the spotlight on the man behind some ubiquitous products

INDUSTRIAL DESIGN plays a huge part in how we interact with the world around us, but it’s not a field that gets an awful lot of prominence in the popular imagination – industrial designers don’t tend to become household names. The comparative renown of Apple’s design chief Jonathan Ive – still not a household name, but probably considered “famous” – demonstrates just how successful the Californian tech company has been at prioritising design, and how influential that aesthetic sensibility has been.

Celebrating the work of Ive is an exhaustive exhibition of his designs at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe (arts and design) in Hamburg. Examples of Ive's design prowess have already featured in many museums and galleries, most famously in New Yorks Museum of Modern Art, but Stylectrical: On Electro-Design that Makes Historyis notable for gathering together every product that Ive and his design team have produced since Steve Jobs returned to Apple and promoted Ive to his position as head of design in 1997, as well as the earlier Apple products he worked on.

But the exhibition also succeeds in putting these works into a larger historical design and cultural context. Thus, Ive’s groundbreaking computers and gadgets sit alongside examples of products that influenced his style, as well as many products that clearly aped the aesthetic sensibilities he popularised. The exhibition implies that Ive’s work is a cornerstone of a design conversation that takes in everything from car design to fashion, with his work at Apple both influencing and responding to patterns in all sorts of other fields.

Stylectricalpays particular attention to the influence of Dieter Rams, the famous German Braun designer whose "10 Principles of Good Design" are the design world's 10 commandments. The deceptive simplicity of his Braun designs, all clean lines and good engineering, are obvious forebears of Ive's creations, and the effect of seeing Rams's outsize LE 1 speaker from 1959 alongside Ive's iMac from 2009, or the famed Braun transistor radio T3 alongside Apple's original iPod is startling – the aesthetic decisions of Braun designers such as Rams, Hans Gugelot and Herbert Hirche are echoing through time in the shape of Ive's products. ( Stylectrical's impressive catalogue features two essays addressing Ive's debt to Rams.)

Perceptively, the exhibition posits that the classic candy-coloured iMac succeeded on an emotional level as furniture as much as technology – it was the first mainstream computer that aspired to be considered alongside the chairs and desks of Eero Saarinen or Ray and Charles Eames. Our relationship with furniture is dictated by its design as much as its utility, and the more considered the design the stronger our emotional connection with it.

Advancing that theory, the iPod, iPhone and iPad have demonstrated how essential such an approach is to our consumer electronics – the relationship goes further than the utility of having all our songs in our pockets, or a computer in our hands; it’s informed by the same relationship we have with our wallets or watches or handbags. Instead of aspiring to be the furniture of the home, Ive’s more recent design successes are the “furniture” of the person.

Arranged to mimic the shapes and patterns of a computer motherboard, a timeline of design in circles and grids and intersections, the exhibition clearly demonstrates the increasing “mobilisation” of Apple’s products – the physically larger Mac Pros and iMacs occur early in Ive’s tenure, gradually supplanted by ever-smaller MacBooks and iPods and iPads, leading to his latest engineering marvel, the MacBook Air, surely as elegant a computer as has ever been designed.

Stylectricalis not merely a comprehensive collection of Apple design, but also in its own way demonstrates that industrial design can succeed as art – the consistency and evolution of Ive's "ouevre" is clear, an early playfulness giving way to an earnest simplicity, as if, having shown that technology can be fun and irreverant, he embraced Rams's design principles and focused on a more coherent minimalism.

The wider lessons to be taken from Stylectrial are manifold. The fact that the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe has extensive galleries dedicated to art nouveau, historical musical instruments and graphic art demonstrates the multifaceted nature of design, and how the work that endures must function as much on grounds of aesthetic appeal as usability and utility.

Another lesson is in the benefits of an intrinsic design process. Far from the scattershot approach of a Sony or a Nokia, who churn out a bewildering range of designs to cater to fickle consumer choice, Ive and Apple have maintained a dedication to consistency and pursuit of perfect form, so much so that the Mac Pro hasn’t changed since 2003, and the iPhone has only had three designs since it changed the mobile world in 2007. It seems that consumer choice isn’t so fickle when the design is integral to a product rather than a mere afterthought, a question of style to be decided on at the end of product’s genesis.

Also, it's evident that the designs on display in Stylectricalare the result of ruthless self-editing and focus, of saying no far more than saying yes. The fact that every single one of Apple's hardware products since 1997 can fit in a single display space is testament to the focus that Steve Jobs instilled in the company.

Stylectricalalso puts a critical element of Ive's influence into perspective – at Apple, like no other company, the scale of its commercial success is directly linked to the success of its industrial design. While there are numerous examples of other firms mimicking Ive's design decisions, very few companies have been able to mimic Apple's deeply-embedded commitment to the design process. Until another company manages to replicate that commitment, it's unlikely that Jonathan Ive will have too many rivals in the "famous industrial designer" stakes.