Hello World: Where Design Meets Life

No sooner did the first iPhone go on sale in 2007 than hackers found ways of devising unauthorized apps to download on to it. Apple eventually bowed to public pressure by allowing them to be sold on its Apps Store, keeping a hefty percentage of the proceeds as a quid pro quo. Soon, it was selling over a billion apps every month, mostly the work of ... See more

It looks like it has come from another planet. A good planet. A planet with better designers. — Steve Jobs introducing the first iMac in 19981

But he had another asset at his disposal, one that is often overlooked by military historians but has proved indispensable to ambitious warlords throughout history: an unusually sophisticated understanding of design.

Not only was this the time at which Dieter Lubs had calculated that the clock faces looked most attractive, the consistent positions of the fingers made the images more memorable, even to people who had glanced at them fleetingly.

The design historian John Heskett has compared the difficulty, if not impossibility, of defining ‘design’ to doing the same for ‘love’.10 Both words have so many layers of meaning that

‘We don’t really talk about design a lot around here, we talk about how things work,’ he said a year after the iPod’s debut. ‘Most people think it is how they look, but it is not really how they look it is how they work.’

Precisely what design means and how it is applied has differed from company to company, industry to industry, country to country and era to era, depending on the scale of the project,

The objective of such ‘designs’ was to provide guidance for the craftsmen who would fabricate their contents, with the aim of ensuring that the end result was as the architect or designer had envisaged. This role seems clear enough, but design was soon also used to describe the thought process behind the development of the ideas represented in thos... See more

Pirates had deployed flags as part of their terror tactics for centuries, but had done so individually.