There's no learning without trying lots of ideas and failing lots of times.
We won't be different for different's sake. Different is easy... make it pink and fluffy! Better is harder. Making something different often has a marketing and corporate agenda.
I don't know how we can compare the old watches we know with the functionality and the capability of the Apple Watch.
It is sad that so many designers don't know how to make. CAD software can make a bad design look palatable! It is sad that four years can be spent on a 3D design course without making anything! People who are great at designing and making have a great advantage.
Apple's Industrial Design team is harder to get into than the Illuminati, and part of the reason is because no one leaves. In the last 15 years, not one of the 18 designers has ditched Apple for greener pastures.
I get an incredible thrill and satisfaction from seeing somebody with Apple's tell-tale white earbuds. But I'm constantly haunted by thoughts of, is it good enough? Is there any way we could have made it better?
The benefit of hindsight is we only really talk about those things that did work out.
If doing anything new, you're very used to having insurmountable obstacles.
Deep in the culture of Apple is this sense and understanding of design, developing, and making. Form and the material and process - they are beautifully intertwined - completely connected.
There is beauty when something works and it works intuitively.
It's a very strange thing for a designer to say, but one of the things that really irritates me in products is when I'm aware of designers wagging their tails in my face.
One of the things that is particularly precious about working at Apple is that many of us on the design team have worked together for 15-plus years, and there's a wonderful thing about learning as a group. A fundamental part of that is making mistakes together.
I think it's important that we learn how to draw and to make something and to do it directly. To understand the properties you're working with by manipulating them and transforming them yourself.
Once, even the simple metal needle challenged the conventional thinking of a time.
Every new car, you open the door, and you look at all those internal mellifluous swoopy bits, and they have no meaning.
It's easy to think that craft can't change but important to remember that all craft process was at some point new, at some point challenged convention - not to be contrary, but enabled by some breakthrough, some newly discovered principle, or sometimes some wonderful accident.
If something is not good enough, stop doing it.
We shouldn't be afraid to fail- if we are not failing we are not pushing. 80% of the stuff in the studio is not going to work. If something is not good enough, stop doing it.
Unless we understand a certain material - metal or resin and plastic - understanding the processes that turn it from ore, for example - we can never develop and define form that's appropriate.
It's great if you can find what you love to do. Finding it is one thing, but then to be able to practise that and be preoccupied with that is another.