Jul 30, 2024
In 1997, while still living and studying in Cologne, Germany, I made a (for a poor student) lavish purchase of a rather expensive (and as it will turn out rare) book from a little-known online bookseller called Telebuch (also known as “ABC Bücherdienst”). Both the book and the seller of said book turned out to be weirdly interwoven with the fabric of our future…
Shortly after my acquisition (and, of course, unrelated), ABC Bücherdienst and its parent company Telebuch were acquired by Amazon to become Amazon.de (and utterly change the course of history for eCommerce in the country), and the book I purchased back then has become one of the hottest collectibles for Apple fans worldwide: It is a (still pristine) copy of “AppleDesign: The Work of the Apple Industrial Design Group”.
My family’s history is closely tied to Apple. My dad bought one of the first original Macintosh computers shipped to Germany, and my first summer job was at the Apple Store where we purchased that Mac. I’ve been an Apple user ever since, captivated by the company’s design philosophy from the moment I saw the first Macintosh ad in a German business magazine. The Macintosh wasn’t just a computer—it was the first time I felt I saw the future (materialized in a box which neatly fit on your desk).
The book is a celebration and a very rare glimpse into the incredible work Apple’s truly bleeding-edge Industrial Design Group did in the late ’80s and early to mid-‘90s. Even by today’s standards, many of the concepts and designs feel not only fresh (and would make a fine addition to any desk (or wrist as in the case of the “TimeBand” prototype) but outright “futuristic”. It comes as no surprise that many of the designs come from a very young Jonathan Ive.
Many people in our industry extol SciFi author William Gibson’s (in)famous quote “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.” In our presentations, we like to remind people that “the future has already happened and we are just catching up to it.” As true as both of these statements are (and the book is yet another artifact confirming this), it implies both one’s ability to seek out the future by looking wide and carefully at what others have done (as is the case with the Apple Industrial Design Group’s book), but also means that we are relegated to living in someone else’s future. And this is, in the end, simply bad.
Living in a future someone envisioned, designed, and created for you, instead of one you created for yourself, is arguably plainly disempowering (both for yourself and your business). You become a passive player in the stream of someone else’s future—relegated to reacting, instead of charting your own course.
Flipping through the book just now, I am reminded by Panera Bread’s founder, former president, and CEO, Ron Shaich’s quote he made when I asked him over dinner about how he turned Panera into a $7BN+ private equity acquisition:
“Our approach has always been to discover today what matters tomorrow and then turn our company into a future that is unfolding before us.”
I might add that this is your future unfolding before you, not someone else’s.
P.S. The Macintosh Repository links to a scanned copy of the book (PDF)…
@Pascal
