Hasta La Ideas

I’d been meaning to wait until I finished Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs before committing to an entry, but I’m only 1/3rd of the way through and feel compelled to tell fellow ID’ers what they might glean from this book that’s relevant to our field. Whether you’re an Apple user or not, this is a story of a man with a powerful appreciation for industrial design that has and will continue to affect the industry that makes for worthwhile, if flawed, reading.

What I mean by the “flawed” part is that author Isaacson is not well-versed in design and makes, thus far, at least one gaffe I consider pretty egregious:

As Jobs’s design sensibilities evolved, he became particularly attracted to the Japanese style and began hanging out with its stars, such as Issey Miyake and I.M. Pei.

I.M. Pei? There’s no doubt that he’s a star architect, but a Modernist one with no particular attachment to “the Japanese style.” After reading that I thought Holy cow, is it possible Isaacson actually doesn’t know the difference between Chinese and Japanese people and lumped Pei in with Miyake based on geographical ethnic proximities? To me this is akin to calling Le Corbusier a German architect.

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