“We live today not in the digital, not in the physical, but in the kind of minestrone that our mind makes of the two.”
—MoMA’s Paola Antonelli, mastermind of Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects, at a recent TED salon titled “Design Is Everywhere.”
Steve Jobs and The Designer
I know there are a lot of these types of posts floating around, but I wanted to talk quickly about something that Steve Jobs made me realize as a designer.
At a party last week I was having a discussion with a banker about design. It was another world to him and he was extremely curious. He asked me a simple question.
“How do you know what people want?”
And I told him that a designers job isn’t to figure out what people want, it’s to give them something they never knew they wanted.
There’s a famous quote allegedly from Henry Ford (the automobile maker):
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
And it was true for Steve Jobs and Apple.
The first response sums it up perfectly.
