“Heartwarming” isn’t a word you normally associate with industrial design, but I dare you to watch this clip of Apple’s lead designer, Sir Jonathan Ive from beloved UK children’s show Blue Peter without cracking a smile.
When asked how he would design a combination pencil case, backpack and lunch box, Ive drops some knowledge straight from the Apple playbook.
“If we’re thinking about a lunchbox, we’d be really careful about not having the word box already, to give you a bunch of ideas that could be quite narrow,” said Ive. “Because you think of a box as being square and like a cube. So we’re quite careful with the words that you use, because those can be narrow and can determine the path that you go down.”
Ive has apparently been a fan of Blue Peter since childhood, and he talks about watching it as a little boy with the reverential tones he normally reserves for Apple’s promotional videos. “It was fantastic, I remember it ever so clearly,” he recalled. Perhaps it’s where he learned to think outside the lunchbox.