Jony Ive espouses outside-the-box design approach

Apple Senior Vice President of Industrial Design Jony Ive recently appeared on the British children’s program Blue Peter, and offered some insight as to how Apple’s design team approaches new product categories, using a lunchbox as an example. “If we’re thinking of lunchbox,” Ive said, “we’d be really careful about not having the word ‘box’ already, you know, give you a bunch of ideas that could be quite narrow. Because you think of a box as being square, and like a cube. And so we’re quite careful with the words we use, because those can sort of determine the path that you go down.” In the segment, Ive also provides feedback on the lunchbox designs of youngsters, and receives a gold Blue Peter badge, the show’s highest accolade. [via Tom Davenport]