You probably already read Stephen Fry’s intelligent, thoughtful article on Steve Jobs. If not, go and do so now, because it’s very good. But the Macalope‘s column today reminded me that I wanted to briefly discuss a couple of points Fry makes that at least half the tech press simply doesn’t seem to understand, and yet that drove almost everything Jobs worked for: design is about how something works, not just how it looks. Good design encompasses everything, from form to (where relevant) technology to human impact.

Fry:

Only dullards crippled into cretinism by a fear of being thought pretentious could be so dumb as to believe that there is a distinction between design and use, between form and function, between style and substance. If the unprecedented and phenomenal success of Steve Jobs at Apple proves anything it is that those commentators and tech-bloggers and “experts” who sneered at him for producing sleek, shiny, well-designed products or who denigrated the man because he was not an inventor or originator of technology himself missed the point in such a fantastically stupid way that any employer would surely question the purpose of having such people on their payroll, writing for their magazines or indeed making any decisions on which lives, destinies or fortunes depended.

This is something I entirely agree with. The mistake people make is to assume not only what Fry mentions later, quoting a Jobs interview with Fortune magazine —

In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa.

— but also that this was all Apple and Jobs have ever been involved with.

It’s depressing that too often these days in technology, someone will talk about design in the negative. They will dismiss a well-designed product as an expensive trinket, or something unsuitable for anyone who doesn’t want a dumbed-down experience. They’ll suggest cheaper alternatives. But, really, good design improves everything: how something looks, how something works, how something interacts with you, how something can save you time or bring you joy.

The final words,I’ll leave to Jobs:

Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.