Creative Selection
Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs
Ken Kocienda
Having read it
★★★★☆
A book that painted a good insight into the author’s time at Apple as a programmer, working, adapting and learning during the 2000s and 2010s, on Mac and iOS software. It also makes clear some good processes, approaches and attitudes that he and his colleagues worked by and lived on to allow better outputs to be reached, for the benefit of individuals, teams and the wider company aims and its ethos. (Which, as he mentions at the end is not quite what it was in that turn-of-the-century period, and as a user of Apple’s products, post that time, I agree with his view. But hey, times change and these things should always adapt and change to contemporary intentions and aims, not just live off past glory.)
A good passage
My insertion point woes were the worst kind of bugs a coder can have, since the bad behaviour didn’t always recur if I backed up and took the same steps again.
Programmers have a name for such defects. We evoke the uncertainty principle from quantum mechanics and the man, Werner Heisenberg, who developed it. My insertion point glitches were ‘heisenbugs’. And fixing insertion point heisenbugs was the hardest programming problem I ever tried to solve.
A second good passage
I have my own definition of taste, and while it isn’t as profound as Kant’s, it’s a useful tool, like a carpenter’s hammer. Taste is developing a refined sense of judgement and finding the balance that produces a pleasing and integrated whole.
A third good passage
Building trust in a personal refined-like response takes time and practice. It also requires a measuring stick. Studying great work from the past provides the means of comparison and contrast and lets us tap into the collective creativity of previous generations. The past is a source of the timeless and enduring. This is where Kant returns to the discussion, and this notion suggests how his philosophy might figure into creative work. I can use Kant, but only if I know about him, and only to the extent that I’ve internalised what he said and what it meant to me. The same goes for the whole scope of creative achievement, from the paintings of Frida Khalo, the blues music of the Reverend Gary Davis, the theories of Charles Darwin, the philosophy of Lao Tzu, the software optimisation ideas of Donald Knuth, or the beliefs and practices of the ancient Greek visitors to the Delphic Oracle. When I study the past, I make a point of deciding what I like, and sometimes this built-up catalogue of refined-like responses about past works finds a suitable outlet and a natural expression in my present-day work.
[...]
The refined-like response doesn’t need to be stuffy or aspire to pretentious connoisseurship, but it does need to be detailed and justifiable.
[...]
On one side, the refined-like response is often a local determination made either early in a design process or at the specific moment of a demo. It often takes the form of ‘I like this animation since it helps to direct the user’s attention appropriately’, or ‘I don’t like this colour scheme because it fails to provide adequate contrast between these dissimilar elements’, or ‘I like multiletter keys because they are easier to tap’. Once these granular decisions are made and are incorporated into a larger system, they no longer stand alone. The small-scale justifications must contribute to a scheme larger than themselves. The design responsibility expands to balancing the many individual refined-like responses against the other side of the taste equation, the attempt to create a pleasing and integrated whole.