Just a couple days after a clip of Jony Ive's appearance on BBC's Blue Peter was revealed, journalist Tom Davenport (via CNET) says he's found an insightful portion of the clip that was cut out. In the new segment, Ive talks about how product naming philosophy can affect the design process.
If we’re thinking of lunchbox, we’d be really careful about not having the word ‘box’ already give you bunch of ideas that could be quite narrow. You think of a box being a square, and like a cube. And so we’re quite careful with the words we use, because those can determine the path that you go down.
As mentioned previously, Ive was a fan of Blue Peter while he was growing up and talks about a design he saw on the show that's stuck with him over the years. This is just another look at Ive's design process, which he's started talking about more and more over the years as Apple's profile has risen and as Ive and his team have received more accolades, which includes his knighting last May.
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You're stupid if you buy 1st gen. Wait for the retina iBox.
I think his point is rather more subtle than how you should name your products. As I understood him, he suggests being careful what words you use in the design process so as to not get caught up in predefined notions of what certain words represent. You still might end up calling your end product the "magical lunch box" even if it looks like no lunch box you've ever seen, just as you might end up calling your hand held touchscreen computer a "phone".
Don't know if it's the best example in this context, but I'm kind of reminded of some of the early hard-drive based MP3 players right around the time the first iPod was released, that looked like portable CD players for some reason: