Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Designer of Apple's iconic products (iPhone, iPod, Watch) with Steve Jobs, reshaped personal tech and created first trillion-dollar company.
On the island
Eight records
To me, when I listen to this, I can smell morning toast. So, I would listen to this a lot at college... if it had been a productive and creative night, as the sun would come up, I can see and smell the toast and listening to Banana Rama.
This is me, I think I was sort of 12, 13 in London. What really struck me was how powerfully simple it was when it drops back to Andy Summers' Riff in the verse and Copeland's rim shots. How simple and in all of that space and the discipline of the framework, how powerful.
This has a profound effect on me. The theme tune is when Michael Caine as Carter is traveling on the train from London to Newcastle. I'd bought a Walkman... and so this was sat on the train listening to a Roy Budd, imagining I was Michael Caine going up to Newcastle.
Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown
This is a song that I recorded. It's of my son. He was five... he was dancing around the room, singing. And I actually suddenly remembered and was so pleased with myself that I had an iPhone with me, that I could record him... this is unrehearsed off the cuff and it's just it's Harry when he's five singing and dancing.
I remember listening to this in a slightly self-centered and over-indulgent way when I was leaving England. And it was terribly emotional. I was immigrating... it was so absurdly pompous to play something that's begging people to not forget about me.
When I listen to this, you almost don't feel that you're obligated or you're constrained by even like the laws of physics. It's so floaty and so almost... it seems to enjoy the liberty of no structure.
40Favourite
I definitely associate it with beginnings and endings. I mean this is they used to close... I remember seeing them play live on the War Tour and they would close the set with this track and Bono would leave and then Edge and one by one they would leave until Larry is left by himself on the stage playing... and dropping a beat and dropping a beat and then stopping, and the lights went off. To me it's a remarkable end.
This is a piece that I think somehow unites people. I wouldn't trust anybody that isn't moved by its serenity and its calm... it's brought to a really beautiful, unified ending to so many evenings that I have so many wonderful associations with.
In conversation
Presenter asks
3:42Do you think [being acutely sensitive] is part of your makeup and who you are and why you became a designer? Or is it part of having spent so much time in your life just thinking about who made that? Why does it work that way? Could it be better?
I think spending too much time in my head... not feeling I had a choice, what I did have a choice about was that this started off as just innately who I was, was I'm so curious. Not in a gentle or passive way, but furiously curious. It drives me crazy if we just accept someone's dogma, whether it's a theory, an idea, or whether it's a way that we're supposed to behave, or whether it's a building, an object. I just want to understand why, why, why is it like that? ... every single made object, to me, I see as in a way an ambassador or certainly a representative of the people that made it. I mean, it gives you such a clear idea about what motivated them, what their values were.
Presenter asks
9:04Your dad went on to become an educator who was hugely influential. He advocated to get DT [design technology] onto the school curriculum... When did you start to understand his legacy and how much he had changed things?
I think when I started to confront some of the prejudice that I think was at the heart of his conviction and work in education, this sense that if you make something that's of lesser value than if you write it, this idea that it's dangerously close just to being a hobby... and every bone in his body and his gift and you know he wanted to study silversmithing and cabinet making and the academic pressure to do something other than that, I think had a huge impact on him.
The keepsakes
The book
The Complete Works of Jeeves (as The Inimitable Jeeves / Carry On, Jeeves etc.)
P. G. Wodehouse
I've returned and read and re-read for thirty years. I I I am absolutely besotted with, still shocked by the fact that I laugh. There's just such a I don't know a a generosity and I can't think of a lovelier book to have with me.
The luxury
a comfortable bed with a down pillow and a cold pillowcase
So I started off wanting a pillow, because I'm a good sleeper. and then I thought I could ask for a bed. Now so a bed and a pillow would be um I would really like I think it's more the mattress and then the pillow, a nice down pillow, and it would be lovely to have a cold pillow case.
Presenter asks
12:53You've described being very shy when you were a little boy, but you have said that that quality was useful to you in some ways. Tell me a little bit more about that. Why exactly?
That drove me into my head. Or perhaps it wasn't that, it's that I daren't venture out... struggled to speak to, you know, in front of more than just uh half a dozen people, really into my early twenties. But I think being in my head I learnt to be comfortable, I suppose, with myself, not needing the affirmation of other people. And so in that space that was private and somehow inviolate, I could ask a lot of questions and not feel embarrassed about their apparent naivete. And while... loneliness wasn't particularly easy and feeling odd wasn't particularly joyful... I really found it was a fabulous foundation for being able to... you can cover a lot of ground in your head that you can't if you really are in the world.
Presenter asks
15:19When you were going through the education system yourself, you came up against the prejudices [about making vs. academic subjects]. So what did you experience? Was it in school, someone saying, 'Oh, well, you're not very good at this. You better go and do some woodwork or something like that'?
I love reading and I love writing. Well I do now, but when I was younger I struggled terribly with both reading and writing and lots of assumptions were made about my intelligence. Perhaps then my interpretation was those assumptions inferred or influenced people's perceptions of my value and in turn that made me not feel great about myself. I think that really informs why well you go and make something in the workshop was because you were unsuccessful in these other academic subjects and rather than being celebrated it was a way to amuse yourself and you know keep you occupied.
Presenter asks
30:26So [Steve Jobs came back] and he asked you to create a network computer that could connect to the Internet. So over to you. How did you set about the task?
What I remember so clearly was it wasn't four months after we met, it was the very first day... Well, I one great way of... if there's nothing like an impossible task to take your mind off of off of your anxiety. Of course, that it was current and urgent. We were within days of becoming bankrupt, literally days. And so we started work from the first day that we met on what became the iMac.
Presenter asks
39:14You've designed many products that have changed our lives and changed culture more widely, but probably the most ubiquitous and impactful has been the iPhone. Is it true that you slept on the factory floor during the early days of manufacture?
The truth is we probably didn't sleep, but we were there. I mean I've lived in the dormitories at the factory for months at a time. I just have never worked in this way where you say here is a design and you sort of throw it over the wall and say just make it and you stamp your foot hoping it's going to work out well. I mean it's never been the way that I work and the team work.
“I'm hugely sensitive... I was a painfully shy child that would spend a lot of time, I think, in my own head. But that's not because I was doing nothing, I was in my own head observing and I guess reacting to what I saw.”
“Not in a gentle or passive way, but furiously curious. It drives me crazy if we just accept someone's dogma, whether it's a theory, an idea, or whether it's a way that we're supposed to behave, or whether it's a building, an object. I just want to understand why, why, why is it like that?”
“No, I'm not interested in technology for technology's sake. I'm interested in people.”
“I was shocked that I had a sense of the people that made it [the first Apple Mac]. They could have been in the room. And you really had a sense of what was on their mind and their values and their sort of joy and exuberance in making something that they knew was helpful.”
“I think probably the overwhelming feeling I had [when meeting Steve Jobs] was one of extraordinary gratitude. The heady sense of being understood and feeling relevant, and I was feeling increasingly irrelevant and increasingly useless.”
“I think almost certainly the rates of change [are my biggest concern about AI]. It's what's talked about least, I think, is just as a function of how fast things are moving, that alone is what concerns me the most. You know, we need time. We need time to understand and react.”