A big definition of who you are as a designer

A big definition of who you are as a designer is the way that you look at the world.

And I guess it's one of the curses of what you do, you're constantly looking at something and thinking, why is it like that? Why is it like that and not like this? And so in that sense, you're constantly designing.

When we're designing a product, we have to look to different attributes of the product, and some of those attributes will be the materials it's made from, and the form that's connected to those materials. So for example with the first iMac that we made, the primary component of that was the cathode ray tube, which was spherical. We would have an entirely different approach to designing something like that, than the current iMac, which is a very thin flat-panel display.

Other issues would be, just physically how do you connect to the product, so for example with something like the iPhone, everything defers to the display.

A lot of what we seem to be doing in a product like that is getting design out of the way. And I think when forms develop with that sort of reason, and they're not just arbitrary shapes, it feels almost inevitable, it feels almost un-designed. It feels almost like, well of course it's that way, why wouldn't it be any other way.

from Jonathan Ive -Objectified-