Coomo6

Applied Humanities

Humanities with Impact The Most Valuable Company in the World 6 Module Six: Impact of the Humanities, continued / Page 6.1.2 The Most Valuable Company in the World On this page: 0 of 4 attempted (0%) | 0 of 3 correct (0%) Objective: Understand the role of humanities-related skills in creating market value.

We are six weeks into this course—more than halfway—and hopefully you are learning a lot about interacting with art. But you might also be wondering what this has to do with your major and future career. It’s a totally fair question: How is a better understanding of “what art does” and “how people respond to it” going to help YOU to be a better accountant, educator, or programmer? The answer is simple enough: If you’re going to be interacting with people, creating services for people, or creating things that people will interact with, then you’re going to be working in the humanities (at least in part).

Granted, it’s a bold claim to say that anyone who works with humans will benefit from the skills developed while trying to figure out what makes a painting “work” or why a particular poem resonates so well. That’s the kind of claim that needs to be backed up— perhaps by looking at how a course in calligraphy might equip someone to build the most valuable company in the world.

Calligraphy

Calligraphy is the art of hand-writing letters. What’s the real value of taking a college course in calligraphy? Well, for one thing, you’ll be able to personally produce some fantastic-looking wedding invitations. But is there anything else to be gained?

Steve Jobs, the co-founder and CEO of Apple who led it to become the most valuable company in the world, often referenced a calligraphy course he took at Reed College. Studying calligraphy requires careful consideration of letter forms and asking questions such as “What helps legibility and what hampers it?” “What creates a balanced look and how little does it take to ruin that?” and “How does the style in which a word is written impact how we understand what the word is saying?”

Speaking of the class, Jobs said “It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating” (Isaacson, 2011, p. 41).

Apple Inc. does not offer calligraphy services. But letter forms themselves aren’t what was important about this course for Jobs. By spending a semester scrutinizing

handwritten letters, Jobs strengthened his understanding of the crucial difference between legible and delightful, functional and animated, serviceable and impressive. He learned about the importance of details and how getting every little thing right results in a dramatically better offering. And he learned how people respond to art, to an artifact, and to seeing something you’ve made. These are skills that served him well in developing world-changing software and hardware.

Fall at Ginkaku-ji Temple Garden of the Silver Pavilion in Kyoto, Japan, November 12, 2012.

Sean Pavone/Getty

The conclusion to be reached here is not that calligraphy is the key to founding a personal computer company, but that the lessons we learn from the study of art can greatly benefit us in any endeavor.

Product Design

A Braun calculator.

Of course, Steve Job’s ambitions didn’t end with studying art. He wanted to know how someone can take the attention to detail and experience that defines great art and put it in the hands of millions of people. That is a question that the best industrial designers have long sought to answer. Jobs studied products created by Braun, Polaroid, and Cuisinart. He thought at length about what made the work of Eames or Sapper great (such as the calculator shown here).

While many designers now ask “What would Apple do?” when developing new products, Jobs was asking what other production designers would do:

Jobs kept insisting that the machine should look friendly. As a result, it evolved to resemble a human face. With the disk drive built in below the screen, the unit was taller and narrower than most computers, suggesting a head. The recess near the base evoked a gentle chin, and Jobs narrowed the strip of plastic at the top so that it avoided looking like a Cro-Magnon forehead. The patent for the design of the Apple case was issued in the name of Steve Jobs as well as Manock and Oyama. “Even though Steve did not draw any of the lines, his ideas and inspiration made the design what it is,” Oyama later said. “To be honest, we didn’t know what it meant for a computer to be ‘friendly’ until Steve told us.” (Isaacson, 2011, p. 129)

Bauhaus

Steve Jobs drew inspiration from many sources, including the Bauhaus school of art:

The Bauhaus was arguably the single most influential modernist art school of the 20th century. Its approach to teaching, and to the relationship between art, society, and technology, had a major impact both in Europe and in the United States long after its closure under Nazi pressure in 1933. The Bauhaus was influenced by 19th and early-20th-century artistic schools such as the Arts and Crafts movement, as well as Art Nouveau and its related styles, including the Jugendstil and Vienna Secession. All of these movements sought to level the distinction between the fine and applied arts, and to reunite creativity and manufacturing. (The Art Story, n.d.)

This sounds like a perfect match for where Jobs was headed: a deep consideration of “art’s relationship to society and technology” seeking to blend “fine and applied arts” and to “reunite creativity and manufacturing.” In the Bauhaus way of thinking, “fine art and craft were brought together with the goal of problem solving for a modern industrial society” (FIU-CARTA Bauhaus-Dessau Think Tank, n.d.). This idea of seeking to solve a problem is the cornerstone of most of the very contemporary discussion around “design thinking,” which is widely touted as the key to success in the coming decades. And Apple may well be the poster child of business success through design thinking:

Jobs publicly discussed his embrace of the Bauhaus style in a talk he gave at the 1983 Aspen design conference, the theme of which was “The Future Isn’t What It Used to Be.” (Isaacson, 2011, p. 126)

Jobs frequently gave credit to his philosophical influences as well as to the industrial designers he felt were getting it right, as he did at the Aspen conference:

What we’re going to do is make the products high-tech, and we’re going to package them cleanly so that you know they’re high-tech. We will fit them in a small package, and then we can make them beautiful and white, just like Braun does with its electronics. (Isaacson, 2011, p. 126)

Who could have predicted that white kitchen appliances designed in the 1950s would lead in a straight line to white earbuds connecting us to our iPhones 50 years later?

Clearly, Jobs’s approach to design was consciously influenced by Bauhaus. And his list of influences is long, including Braun and other industrial designers as well as more classic forms of fine art such as the Kyoto gardens and handwritten calligraphy. The

sensitivities he developed through a lifetime of study of what he called “the sublime” are what eventually came to set Apple apart from countless other manufacturers of personal computers, software, music players, and phones.

Harvard Business Review is among the many prestigious publications encouraging today’s leaders to look deeper into “design thinking.” In a September 2015 article titled “Design Thinking Comes of Age,” author Jon Kolki discusses the principles of such an approach: “Focus on users’ experiences, especially the emotional ones,” he writes. “To build empathy with users, a design-centric organization empowers employees to observe behavior and draw conclusions about what people want and need.”

Multiple-Choice Question

What kinds of jobs are better done by people who are experienced at studying the humanities?

any job that involves humans or making things for humans only jobs related to art only jobs in museums only jobs that cannot be performed by robots

Multiple-Choice Question

What was the stated impact of making the first Apple computer look a bit like a face?

It made it look friendlier and thus easier to use. It helped people to treat it like a coworker. Most computers at the time looked like faces. It reminded people of Jobs.

Multiple-Choice Question

Which of the following prominently influenced Apple?

IBM Sony the Bauhaus

the abacus

Response Board In one sentence, summarize how familiarity with the humanities helped Jobs in his role at Apple.

No response saved yet.

Postscript

Jony Ive now leads design at Apple. From comments like this one, it’s clear that he too understands the principles of the humanities:

Why do we assume that simple is good? Because with physical products, we have to feel we can dominate them. As you bring order to complexity, you find a way to make the product defer to you. (Isaacson, 2011, p. 343)

close

Share your thoughts with your peers...