Writing is a Primary Design Tool
In an interview with Tracy Francis at McKinsey, Jony Ive had something profound to say about writing and design:
“You’ll often find creatives are obsessed with process and tools. A primary tool for me is that I write an awful lot. I write because I realized at art school that you can only draw a small percentage of the attributes of an object. You know, if I were to draw this [holds up a glass], you would understand only 20 percent of its nature. You would have no sense of its weight or material or temperature. You would have no sense of the way that it reacted to its environment. Writing helps me frame the problem. A lot of mistakes are made when you frame a problem, because you could already be dismissing 60 percent, 70 percent of the potential ideas.” — Jony Ive
I also Tweeted it.
This, from Jony Ive, is profound.https://t.co/Ax3GxDPSo2 pic.twitter.com/P9D7cIyOYY
— Christopher Butler 🦠 (@chrbutler) June 9, 2023