Apple Inc’s celebrated industrial design team is a group of around 16 “maniacal” individuals from all over the world who spend a lot of time brainstorming around a kitchen table.<\/p>\n
The world’s most valuable technology corporation on Tuesday allowed a rare glimpse into a zealously guarded internal hardware design process that has produced some of the world’s most celebrated consumer electronics.<\/p>\n
In a high-profile U.S. patent infringement trial against Samsung Electronics Co Ltd that began this week, it called 17-year Apple design veteran Christopher Stringer as its first witness.<\/p>\n
Stringer looked every inch the designer with his shoulder-length hair, salt-and-pepper beard, wearing an off-white suit with a narrow black tie.<\/p>\n
“Our role is to imagine products that don’t exist and guide them to life,” he told the jury.<\/p>\n
Apple’s products — particularly the seminal iPhone — are held in high regard throughout the industry. The gadget that revolutionized the smartphone industry is prominently displayed in the avant-garde San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.<\/p>\n
The company, which is accusing its South Korean arch-foe of stealing iPhone and iPad design and features, owes a debt to creative guru Jonathan Ive and his cadre of designers assembled from Britain, Australia, the United States, Japan, Germany over more than a decade.<\/p>\n
Stringer said Apple’s group of 15 to 16 industrial designers — headed by the British-born and recently knighted Ive — work on all of the company’s products and dedicate time every week to discuss them, mostly at the kitchen table.<\/p>\n
That’s where the group is “most comfortable,” he said.<\/p>\n
Ive’s team leads works out of a large, open studio on Apple’s campus in Cupertino, California, with music blaring through a giant sound system and access strictly limited to a small portion of employees, according to a 2006 profile of Ive in Business Week.<\/p>\n
Brainstorming<\/strong><\/p>\n Most of the team have worked side-by-side for 15 to 20 years, said Stringer, who has “hundreds” of design patents to his name.<\/p>\n “We have been together for an awfully long time,” Stringer said. “We are a pretty maniacal group of people. We obsess over details.”<\/p>\n Over the years, the team earned a reputation for blending the aesthetically appealing with the functional. Stringer worked on the original iPhone — internally codenamed M-68 — and almost all of Apple’s mobile products.<\/p>\n Once a product design idea is solidified through a brainstorming session, the design team sketches those ideas and models it through a Computer Aided Design process.<\/p>\n The design team doesn’t follow a linear creative process from idea to sketch, model and then to engineered demo, Stringer said. Developed concepts will be scrapped if a better idea comes along, he said.<\/p>\n “We are always doubting. We are always questioning.”<\/p>\n Stringer listed some of the manufacturing problems for the original iPhone, from putting glass in close proximity to hardened steel to cutting holes in the glass.<\/p>\n “People thought we were crazy,” he said.<\/p>\n Related Articles<\/strong><\/p>\n Apple vs. Samsung court battle heats up<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Apple vs. Samsung jury selected<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Samsung, Apple take landmark patent fight to trial<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Apple says that Samsung is being unfair<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n