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"Don’t Design By Committee: Another interesting tidbit from the most recent D Conference was Steve Jobs’ comment that Apple was the largest startup on the plane
by api 16y ago
"Don’t Design By Committee: Another interesting tidbit from the most recent D Conference was Steve Jobs’ comment that Apple was the largest startup on the planet and that there were no committee. Apple puts the company first and foremost, not individual people. No one person, even Steve himself, is above Apple."
This paragraph directly contradicts itself. Committees are what you get from "no I in team" corporate collectivist ideology.
Apple has I's in its team: Steve Jobs, and I'm sure a number of their best designers and engineers as well. Apple can make good well-designed un-cluttermongered products because these people have the ability and the courage to say "no, bad idea." Great things are usually the product of one integrating mind. Committees roll balls of junk.
There is no doubt in my mind that when Steve is gone Apple will suck. I'm sure the investors will put some ivy-league MBA apparatchik in charge, and he'll form committees and be very proactive at leveraging their core competencies.
- Hagelin 16y agoI don't think it's contradictory, but it is perhaps mixing together two separate points, that Jobs or someone else ultimately accepts or rejects ideas and designs, and that Jobs claims these judgements are made based on the merits of the idea, not who came up with it.
- ThomPete 16y agoDesign by committee means that your design decisions is based on negotiation. Design is a decisions, decisions that are negotiated are rarely if ever crisp and consistent but rather a trade-off between different opposing views. That is the point more than whether there is a team. If the team thinks the same way, you don't need to do the trade-off. Nobody ever built a statue of a committee.
- jasonlbaptiste 16y agoI wanted to go into how Ideo does design here. It's actually one of the few case studies that were useful to me in undergrad. It's a selfless organization where the best ideas win and I feel there has to be some correlation between ideo + apple doing this and their success in the design world.
- ThomPete 16y agoYeah, although IDEO have moved into a company that do more design research than product design (they still do a lot but it't not their focus) But yes the ability to create design discussion around a common goal rather than peoples opinion is the Holy Grail of successful design.