Steve Jobs and Apple

On the day Apple launches iOS7 and with the approach of the second anniversary of the death of the company's visionary leader it seems an appropriate opportunity to republish an article I wrote about Steve Jobs for the November 2011 edition of Irish Printer.

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It is quite extraordinary that an organisation in corporate America widely renowned as a world leader would use its global shop window to display an obituary photograph rather than promoting its most recently introduced product. And yet that is exactly what Apple did after launching the iPhone 4S. Steve Jobs died the following day and his photograph opened the website for almost two weeks. This, more than any other act, demonstrated the reverence in which the innovative leader of Apple Inc is held. 

The man who co-founded the world's most valuable consumer-facing brand [note 1] has been eulogised since his death at the early age of fifty-six. Articles across the world’s media have claimed he changed the world as we know it by developing the standard graphical user interface now familiar to all users of personal computers, perfecting the mouse for the marketplace, introducing the most accessible personal computer while also inventing the iPod, iPhone and iPad. Along the way he also revolutionised the design and print industries, the digital music industry and the mobile phone industry [note 2]. Not a bad legacy for a self-proclaimed college dropout [note 3].

My first inkling of the genius of Jobs came in the latter part of the 1980s when my design company invested in our first Apple Macintosh II computer and laser printer. They were so expensive that a five-year loan was required for the purchase, which then remained unused in the corner of the studio for six months. We didn’t dare start a job on the Mac for fear we wouldn’t be able to produce camera-ready artwork suitable for print. No one knew how to migrate from the familiar world of professional computer typesetting and pasted-up artwork to the intangibility and uncertainty of the digital wysiwyg world. In the high-pressure atmosphere of a busy design studio there was little time to spare learning an untried and untested approach. Nevertheless, gradually the Mac was drawn into service – originally as a typesetting machine – and thus began the inevitable development of an entirely digital workflow.

In 1989 I was contracted to advise the London based Brompton Group advertising agency on the introduction of a Mac system for the design and production of corporate literature for its biggest client, Lloyds Bank. It is difficult now to imagine just how difficult this task was at that time. The Mac was still largely untested in the design and print sector. Typographers in particular were fearful (rightly, as it turned out) for their jobs and so proclaimed loudly (and incorrectly) that type set on a Mac was grossly inferior to photosetting and computer set type. Art Directors refused to go near the keyboard and continued producing traditional scamps and rough layouts for the ‘Mac operator’ to work up. The Finished Art department could not even contemplate laying down their scalpels and letraset. Just as in any revolution many continued in denial until the inevitability of progress removed them from the scene. Those that couldn’t adapt were forced out.

My career, on the other hand, was at a good stage to benefit from the change. Having originally trained in a quintessentially traditional studio established outside Bradford by a designer who learned his craft at Lund Humphries with Herbert Spencer I went on to study for a degree in visual communication in Dublin. By the time I established a design practice in 1985 I had wide experience working in letterpress, offset litho and silkscreen. Layouts were produced in pencil with accurate specifications for print reproduction. I could render ten-point type with a high degree of precision after a year doing so for full-page newspaper ads. This was a crucial skill due to the cost of typesetting – mistakes often meant the difference between profit and loss on a job. But for young designers filled with the enthusiasm to experiment and go beyond the traditional typographic conventions the need for our work to be mediated by craftsmen could be frustrating. Busy typesetters with conventional training in this traditional craft were not always sympathetic to our motivations and generally wanted to get a job typeset, delivered and billed. My co-founder at Information Design, Ron Hamilton, once described the experience as being akin to learning to ice skate with one hand tied behind his back.

The Mac, once we rescued it from the dark corner of the studio and figured out how to use it, abolished those restrictions forever. It liberated type and allowed designers complete freedom to improvise and experiment. This period resulted in some incredibly exciting and inspiring work particularly by designers like April Greiman and David Carson in the US and Octavo Design, Vaughan Oliver and Neville Brody in the UK. It also inspired a review of the work of the early modern pioneers of typography such as El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Apollinaire's "figurative poetry” along with the influence of Futurist, Dada and de Stijl movements on graphic design.

While designers were enjoying their new found freedom the Mac was having an altogether different impact on the wider print sector. Typesetting houses began to disappear as word processing took over. Some companies managed to reinvent themselves as bureaus for outputting the bromides and film that were replacing pasted-up camera-ready artwork. The trade of the typesetter soon disappeared and the art of setting readable type suffered frequently at the hands of those untrained for the task.

The capabilities of the Mac expanded with the development of software applications such as Adobe Photoshop and significant improvements in the quality of desktop scanners. Origination companies with large investments in drum scanners began to feel the pressure and eventually all but disappeared. At the time few outside the trade realised the significance of the knowledge base and wealth of experience that could not be replaced easily or replicated by a computer. The skill and expertise of an originator who manages the conversion of an image from continuous tone transparency (made up of millions of colours) to reproduction in cyan, yellow, magenta and black ink included a high level of subjective judgement honed over years of practice. Part of the price to be paid for the convenience brought by the Mac has been an increase in poor quality reproduction.

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In the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century there were a number of high profile inventors who changed society with great rapidity. Edison is widely regarded as being the first to develop the industrial research laboratory [note 4] in a facility that occupied two city blocks by the 1880s. He registered over a thousand patents and is particularly remembered for perfecting the electric light bulb which had incalculable impact. It could be argued, however, that his real ingenuity was the development of the infrastructure to deliver electric power at an affordable price enabling every home to acquire this resource [note 5].

Similarly, Jobs will be remembered for his ability to harness the supply chain or, more often, to develop a completely new supply chain to deliver Apple's innovative services. He also demonstrated an astounding ability to perfect existing technology and develop completely new processes for the consumer to access it. It was this ability to provide a fully integrated and reliable user experience that continually set Apple apart and resulted in a customer base with exceptional devotion to its brand [note 6].

When competing products in the marketplace are virtually the same it is difficult to maintain differentiation and a competitive edge. Jobs clearly understood that design was central to innovation and reliability and built a company whose design philosophy makes it unique. In a very real sense Apple is the biggest design company in the world. Through this lens the product line might be seen as somewhat incidental, emerging from the design process to fulfill previously unimagined consumer desires and needs. The reshaping of how we consume popular music demonstrates this strategy. To harness the power of downloading music online Apple developed an entirely new shop-front with the iTunes Store and facilitated consumers with the iPod. Purchasing music is now a seamless process from the moment of hearing a tune to acquiring it – with Apple at the centre.

The positioning of design at the heart of Apple’s strategy has resulted in a range of premium products that are not particularly price sensitive. Margins are significantly greater therefore generating a higher return on investment than competitors. This focus on systems and processes that respond to (and sometimes prompt) changes in society is the fundamental reason for Apple’s phenomenal success. Steve Jobs recognised this from early on and it is clear that on his return to the helm in 1997 his focus was on implementing this strategy. The subsequent success of Apple in the marketplace led to his iconic status as a visionary and charismatic businessman, not only in the eyes of his own employees and customers but also among his direct competitors and in the wider business community.

Conjugating Irish identity

Today, in my role as Chair of the Board of the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media (GradCAM) I introduced the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Councillor Naoise Ó Muirí, to launch the conference Object Matters: Making 1916 at the Wood Quay Venue in the Civic Offices of Dublin City Council. Here's what I said.

Six days that shook Dublin… that shook Ireland… that shook Britain… that shook the world? Or perhaps not. While the Easter Rising of 1916 certainly shook up the city it did not necessarily have the support of Dublin citizens at the time, with public opinion remaining opposed in its aftermath:

Regardless of their political outlook, most people responded to the end of the rebellion with relief. The streets of Dublin remained dangerous, with snipers continuing to fire from rooftops well into the following week, as people struggled to purchase food, collect pensions and wages, and return to everyday life (McGarry 2010).

Supporters of Redmond's Home Rule party even believed it to be a dastardly German plot (Lee 1989). Yet, we now recognise those six days as pivotal in Irish history. Writing in The Irish Times in 1996 Garret FitzGerald notes that as a result of the Rising:

Two years later, in the 1918 election, the tiny proportion who in 1914 had favoured separation of Ireland from Britain rather than Home Rule had jumped almost tenfold to half the electorate.

The historical, political, economic and social impact of those Easter events almost one hundred years ago has been well documented in the intervening years.

Today and tomorrow, however, we are gathering to examine how they have shaped our understanding of ourselves; to unpick what has become so much a part of our being that we don’t even see it any more. Material and visual culture is at the heart of identity and the really interesting thing about identity is how fluid and malleable it can be at particular times.

I am particularly interested in the concept of identity formation as a process rather than a single act. I have heard it described as:

the conjugation of identity.

That idea is tantalising and it explains the power of identity – as it resonates with repetition and rhythm – until the habit is internalized and becomes subconscious. It carries on unnoticed becoming part of who we are. It is the everyday experience of living that informs this process. A process that is shaped by what we see around us, what we hear, the tools we use – the world of the senses: through which we absorb information almost without being aware of it and perhaps with a less conscious critical evaluation.

It is the very ordinariness of existence that shapes us. But, of course, that experience is most difficult to impart. Many artists, writers, musicians and filmmakers in particular spend their creative lives interpreting the ordinariness of existence. Paradoxically, in that act of creativity they make the ordinary extraordinary. So it is with history. Events that may well be ordinary at the time of living become significant later on. This theme is explored with insight in Brian Friels’ 1989 play 'Making History', in which he explores the conflict between the participants and the historians: those who make history and those who wish to Make History.

Over the next two days we will hear about such diverse matters as the forgery of official documents, the impact of fashion on identity, the sense of place, memory and forgetting, the power of military uniforms, flags, and craftwork made in prisons.

It promises to be very interesting.

Online: exploitation or opportunity?

New technologies upset society. For the early adopters the rewards can be great but society in general resists change. Declamation of the rise of digital technology is a current and recurring example. The usual argument is that it will result in the demise of print and consequently have a negative impact on literacy. This perspective seems to me to be misguided: it confuses the medium with the message. Perhaps McLuhan can be held responsible but I suspect it is simply the natural human resistance to change and the consequent shift in power.

As human beings discovered writing I imagine there were significant issues around the shift from an oral tradition. It is probable that the poets and bards who were responsible for administering the oral Brehon Law in pre-Norman Ireland resisted efforts to have it recorded. Once the law was written down there would be little need for the poets who had spent their lives memorising it. As they lost power and authority new opportunities became available for those who learnt to write and became scribes.

During the Middle Ages a highly sophisticated approach to religious manuscript reproduction developed in Europe. By the mid-fifteenth century cities such as Paris already had a two-hundred year tradition of commercial trade in manuscripts in addition to the production of religious manuscripts. One can only imagine the challenge that Gutenberg and his contemporaries represented to this status quo as they developed print reproduction using movable type.

What interests me about this history is how, at each development, the world of ideas is opened up to a greater proportion of the population. Cheaper methods of reproduction resulted in wider access. Today, illiteracy is considered one of the single most debilitating afflictions in society because written/printed information is ubiquitous. Since the fifteenth century society and culture in the Western World has been altered out of all recognition and it would not be an exaggeration to claim that the discovery of printing with movable type is the fundamental cause.

When technologies change those who see themselves as the gate keepers of knowledge and information resist the loss of their power… vigorously.

Throughout early 2013 columnists at The Irish Times published opinion pieces about online publishing and social media. David Adams (Much internet Journalism at level equivalent to Stone Age) and John Waters (Venomous and toxic social media out of control) led the charge with well-worn platitudes on the calibre of print journalism versus online writing that revolved largely around process. Adams proclaims the superiority of traditional journalism in the print media by describing the methodology of fact-checking by the writer, followed by an editorial procedure resulting in the dissemination of reliable information. This was presented as being in stark contrast to the methodology ascribed to 'so-called internet journalism'. Leaving aside the hard won reputation of online titles such as the Huffington Post and the transition to a digital-only format by Newsweek, not to mention the successful online edition of the New York Times, the fundamental problem with this argument is the failure to acknowledge the possibility that the process of traditional journalistic methodology is independent of form. It can be as easily employed in on online context as it has been in print.

But, the real problem with their lack of vision is the failure to see how digital online technology has already changed journalism. That is what McLuhan identified fifty years ago: the medium has an irreversible impact on the message. It massages it, shapes it, contextualises it and ultimately forms it. Any attempt to critique media today without taking account of this understanding is, at best, misinformed.

The credibility of The Irish Times was restored somewhat when Hugh Linehan, Online Editor, (Big online issues lost amid Twitterphobia) countered their myopic viewpoints and poorly informed opinions in a later article.

Then Fintan O'Toole revealed an equally naive attitude in a piece about the music industry when he asked Streaming, stealing: what's the difference? He suggests that the streaming model employed by companies such as Pandora and Spotify is essentially exploitative. He goes on to argue that implicit in this arrangement is the thoughtlessly selfish attitude of the consumer. Just as we are happy to ignore the real human cost of the cheap clothing available in department stores dependent on sweat-shop labour O'Toole argues we demand cheap music at exploitative rates. So, what's new? From the days of Tin Pan Alley popular music promoters have been exploiting artists in collusion with consumers. The story has been told in countless Hollywood movies and through the lyrics of many pop songs. 'Come in boy, have a cigar…by the way, which one is Pink?' sang Pink Floyd on the classic album Wish You were Here. The entire contemporary popular music sector has always been based on the exploitation of ambitious artists – irrespective of the delivery platform.

Contrary to O'Toole's view I would argue that the Internet and online music distribution has given artists the opportunity to reach previously unimagined audiences. For example, sites such as Magnatune offer artists a fair return for their efforts and specialise in professional artists who are not necessarily signed to major recording labels. Artists are also establishing their own sites to distribute their music and maintain control in a way never before possible. With the broad reach of the web niche audiences are now accessible and can provide a reasonable income to minority-interest artists. 

Two recent examples demonstrate how musicians have been much more adept at exploiting new technologies while highlighting the importance of listening to the music than O'Toole imagines.

Platinum wining singer/songwriter Beck Hansen returned to the Tin Pan Alley days by releasing his most recent album Song Reader as a book of sheet music rather than a recording. In an effort to remind music fans that it is worth devoting time and attention to his work he requires them to become part of the music by performing it themselves and encourages them to post the results online for all to see and hear at Song Reader. He even challenged the traditional publishing and distribution routes by using book publisher Faber and Faber in the UK and McSweeney's online bookstore in the US.

In a coincidentally similar but unrelated development musician Pierce Turner released an Apple iOS app earlier this year. Snow is also distributed by a publishing house, Associated Editions, rather than a record company. It broadens the scope of the artist's creative ability by including a discussion with award-winning writer Eoin Colfer, scenes from the recording, live performances, original notation and images inspired by the song. The app has been downloaded globally bringing Turner to new audiences.

Such imaginative and creative responses from artists to the ubiquity of recorded music in contemporary life and the new possibilities offered by the web give us a glimpse into an exciting online future.

Is the future online?

Earlier this week the online education provider Hibernia College launched a range of new undergraduate programmes in creative computing and business. This is a significant move for a college that has made its name in teacher training and has become the leading provider of primary teachers in the country. When it started some ten years ago it was in the face of considerable opposition from the established colleges and a general scepticism about the likelihood of success for a private fee paying school. The Irish Times suggests the latest launch:

will test the growing market for private third level education in the Republic.

More significantly, I believe, it will test the market for online education. There is nothing particularly new in distance education but it has never had a particularly high profile here. Oscail, the DCU distance education programme, has been offering degrees since 1982. The Open Universitiy also has a base here and many other higher education institutions have some form of distance, remote or outreach offerings. More recently we have seen the rise of the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) with proprietary systems such as Moodle or Blackboard and the use of platforms such as Second Life. Until the arrival of Hibernia uptake by students has been modest. Nevertheless, a survey of five higher education institutions in 2008 suggests that students don't believe that lecturers make good enough use of their VLEs.

Closer examination of what precisely is being described by terms like online, distance, remote, blended and elearning is important. For example, the Hibernia, Oscail and Open University offerings are exclusively by distance. They are not based around a campus and delivery is by correspondence and over the internet. Typically, however, there is a programme of tutorial support at study centres. In addition, live online tutorials via the web are becoming a feature of this provision.

But much of what is described as online learning, or elearning, is designed to supplement traditional delivery. Whether it is simply making lecture notes and PowerPoint slides available online or moderating online discussions outside normal class time, allowing students to review recorded lectures or referencing some of the excellent material already available on sites such as You Tube, Vimeo or TED. Clearly the intention is not to replace traditional delivery.

Bigger claims have been made by some. Last month I wrote about the MIT and Harvard Edx partnership which issued 7,000 online students with certificates recently. The Australian online academic publication The Conversation recently posted an article titled Virtual campus: online universities are the future of higher education. The discussion comments following the article are worth reading to get a sense of the diverse opinions held by academics. Many still mistrust the impact of technology on education.

My own direct experience of using distance and remote strategies on DIT's Visual Art degree delivered in Sherkin Island off the west coast and delivering the module Virtual Environments: Is one life enough? lead me to believe that one of the principal benefits of harnessing technology is the widening of educational opportunity. Those once isolated from participating, whether through economic, geographic, political or personal circumstances, can now access education—should we wish to provide it in this format.

So, back to Hibernia's success over the last ten years. It seems to indicate a very definite market for private higher education—a message unlikely to be lost on the Minister for Education and Skills who is determined to generate additional income streams. It also appears to identify a demand for flexible delivery—something we constantly talk about in higher education circles and a topic to which I will return.

There is a final significant element to the announcement—the decision by Hibernia College to seek validation from the University of London. I don't know the reason for external validation nor whether Irish institutions were considered or approached. Either way, it highlights the importance of reputation in higher education. Not only institutional reputation but national reputation. We have always prided ourselves on the calibre of the Irish educational system: in fact we have developed a brand Education in Ireland that is managed by Enterprise Ireland (meaning the brand is aimed at the export market). Brands need to be nurtured and protected. No doubt the new Qualifications and Quality Assurance Authority is watching with interest.

On being creative …

Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.
—Robert Louis Stevenson 

I took the time to reread Stevenson's essay An Apology for Idlers before leaving home for work this morning. I found the Anthology of Prose Writing that introduced my fifteen year old self to this, and many other essay writers, while still at school. It is interesting how some concepts stay with you even though you may not fully understand them at first.

My early morning search of the bookshelves was prompted by a realisation that lately there has been little time for idleness in my own busy life. Stevenson's well crafted exposition on the importance of idleness to creative thought has been reworked many times since. A recent opinion piece in the New York Times reshaped it for a contemporary audience concluding that:

Life it too short to be busy.

It suggests that idleness is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body. John Cleese also proclaims the importance of making space for creativity. He puts it quite bluntly saying that if you spend your day running around ticking things off lists you are not going to have any creative ideas. Usefully, he goes on to describe a methodology for integrating idleness with our busy lives. It requires the creation of a time and space bound oasis where your 'mind can come out to play', where creativity is allowed to arise and the more usual critical faculties of the mind are put away for a while.

I have a tendency to indulge the conceit that our modern world is so much busier than ever before, that we have so much more on our plates than our predecessors. At various times I have this blamed this on email, the internet, computers, mobile phones, or simply the ubiquitous nature of communication. This, despite the fact that Stevenson described an equally busy life in 1877. It might be argued that he was writing as the effects of the Industrial Revolution were creating our modern world but, it is quite clear Stevenson was arguing that busyness is more a self-imposed state of mind than an objective reality. He was warning of the consequences of not allowing the mind to come out to play.