Steve’s talk at the 1983 International Design Conference in Aspen
Clips from Steve’s talk at the IDCA
Introduction by Jony Ive
Steve rarely attended design conferences. This was 1983, before the launch of the Mac, and still relatively early days of Apple. I find it breathtaking how profound his understanding was of the dramatic changes that were about to happen as the computer became broadly accessible. Of course, beyond just being prophetic, he was fundamental in defining products that would change our culture and our lives forever.
On the eve of launching the first truly personal computer, Steve is not solely preoccupied with the founding technology and functionality of the product’s design. This is extraordinarily unusual, as in the early stages of dramatic innovation, it is normally the primary technology that benefits from all of the attention and focus.
Steve points out that the design effort in the U.S. at the time had been focused on the automobile, with little consideration or effort given to consumer electronics. While it is not unusual to hear leaders talk about the national responsibility to manufacture, I thought it was interesting that he talked about a nation’s responsibility to design.
In the talk, Steve predicts that by 1986 sales of the PC would exceed sales of cars, and that in the following ten years, people would be spending more time with a PC than in a car. These were absurd claims for the early 1980s. Describing what he sees as the inevitability that this would be a pervasive new category, he asks the designers in the audience for help. He asks that they start to think about the design of these products, because designed well or designed poorly, they still would be made.
Steve remains one of the best educators I’ve ever met in my life. He had that ability to explain incredibly abstract, complex technologies in terms that were accessible, tangible and relevant. You hear him describe the computer as doing nothing more than completing fairly mundane tasks, but doing so very quickly. He gives the example of running out to grab a bunch of flowers and returning by the time you could snap your fingers – speed rendering the task magical.
When I look back on our work, what I remember most fondly are not the products but the process. Part of Steve’s brilliance was how he learned to support the creative process, encouraging and developing ideas even in large groups of people. He treated the process of creating with a rare and wonderful reverence.
The revolution Steve described over 40 years ago did of course happen, partly because of his profound commitment to a kind of civic responsibility. He cared, way beyond any sort of functional imperative. His was a victory for beauty, for purity and, as he would say, for giving a damn. He truly believed that by making something useful, empowering and beautiful, we express our love for humanity.
The Story
On a sunny June morning in 1983, Steve waits at the back of a giant tent, ready to take the stage at the International Design Conference in Aspen. This year’s theme is “The Future Isn’t What It Used to Be,” and he is here to talk about computers to an audience of several hundred designers and design-lovers.
The night before, Steve gave a demonstration of the Lisa computer, one of the first commercially available machines with a mouse and a graphical user interface. These innovations meant that people would no longer need to type commands or punch arrow keys to use a computer. Instead they could use a mouse to click, drag, and navigate among icons, menus, and graphics—and even draw and paint.
Interior of Aspen Amphitheater, 1983
Steve had been happy to introduce Apple’s latest product, but he knows that this morning’s speech, here under the gauzy Eero Saarinen–designed tent in the flower-filled fields of the Aspen Institute, is the main event. Called to the stage, he bounds down the center aisle, notebook in hand. He leaps up to take his place at the podium. He is the cofounder and chair of Apple, a “legend in his own time,” according to his onstage introduction—but he is also 28 and excited for this, his first formal talk to a gathering of esteemed designers. He has chosen not to title his presentation; the program refers to it only as “Talk.”
He leans into the microphone. “They paid me sixty dollars, so I wore a tie,” he says, gesturing to the striped bow tie he has paired with a sports jacket and jeans. A grin stretches across his face; the audience laughs. He takes off his jacket, realizes there is nowhere to put it, and drops it to the floor, where it lays in a crumpled heap for the rest of his talk.
“How many of you own an Apple?” he asks from the stage.
No reaction.
“Any, or…just any personal computer?”
A bit of rustling from the audience. They are shifting in their seats. For most of them, design is still a craft of pencils, paper, rubber cement, straight edges, and clay.
Steve laughs. “Uh–oh. How many of you’ve used one, or seen one—anything like that?”
He must see a few hands raised in the audience. “Good. OK.” Steve rolls up his shirt sleeves. He has his work cut out for him.
Apple Lisa Computer Print Advertisement, 1983
Computers were so rare in American homes at this time that the U.S. Census wouldn’t begin tracking their presence for another year. Even then, in 1984, only 8 percent of households had a computer (and of those that did, roughly 70 percent of those machines had been bought in the past two years). By contrast, 98 percent of households had televisions.
People didn’t own computers, but they did have a sense that the machine was about to become very, very important. A few months before Steve spoke at Aspen, Time Magazine had bucked its own tradition to name the computer its Man of the Year, the machine thus joining the ranks of presidents, monarchs, astronauts, and peacemakers. And on the strength of the personal computer’s promise, Apple had just become the youngest company to join the Fortune 500.
What this new machine would mean for daily life, however, was still unclear in 1983. An internal Apple document cautions that many people encountering a computer for the first time “might be a little bit afraid. They still aren’t sure they can actually operate a computer, but know it’s time they join the ‘revolution’.”
Steve has come to Aspen as a standard-bearer for this revolution. Back at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California, he is leading the development of everything he thinks the company will need to bring computers to “the rest of us”: the publicity, the advertising, the educational programs, the groundbreaking television commercial, and above all, the right machine. The Macintosh, of course, would be that machine, combining the best of the Lisa with other breakthroughs and packaging them all in a squat, friendly little case with a footprint hardly bigger than a typewriter.
But he cannot talk about the work secretly in development, much less show it. His only tools are his passion and the blue spiral notebook he has placed on the lectern in front of him.
On stage, Steve launches into a history of computing. He regularly consults his notebook, reading or glancing at its pages to confirm the year that the first computer-science degree was granted or details about the pioneering ENIAC computer and the timesharing models that followed.
In the middle of this studied presentation, he interrupts himself. “Let me digress for a minute,” he says. Then he goes off script.
“One of the reasons I’m here is because I need your help.”
For this, the heart of his message to the designers in Aspen, he doesn’t need his notes.
He predicts that the industry will sell three million computers in 1983 and ten million in 1986, “whether they look like a piece of shit or they look great.” The audience, pleasantly scandalized, laughs at his swearing, but Steve doesn’t crack a smile. He doesn’t say so, but he has already seen proof of what he considers indiscriminate taste: sales of the IBM PC, the computer Steve is likely thinking of when he says that current machines “look like garbage” and are a “pain in the ass,” have just overtaken sales of Apple’s flagship Apple II.
One American industry after another—cars, televisions, cameras, watches—has lost market share to foreign competition, he explains, and he is worried that the same will happen with the computer if it becomes what he calls “one more piece-of-junk-object.” This moment, when “computers and society are out on a first date”—and here he interlaces his fingers to show how close that relationship could one day become—offers a rare opportunity that they must seize together. The audience is present at the birth of something monumental, and they can help define it. His voice rises with emotion. “We need help. We really, really need your help.”
Steve has spent the past few years learning everything he can about design. He has always loved beautiful objects, and from its very beginning, Apple paid particular attention to product design. On the day the company was incorporated, Apple’s first board chair Mike Markkula circulated a memo reminding the staff, “People DO judge a book by its cover.”
The Apple Marketing Philosophy, 1977
To serve as Apple’s first in-house designer, Steve hired Jerry Manock, who had worked a few miles up the road at Hewlett-Packard. Steve adored his HP-35 calculator, not just for its functionality but also for how it felt in his hand and for the haptic response of the keys when he pressed them. He wanted that attention to detail applied to Apple’s products. And as Apple hired more designers and worked with outside firms like Hovey-Kelley Design (whose co-founder David Kelley would go on to launch IDEO), Steve did everything he could to learn from the experts. He studied their fashion choices; a few days after he saw industrial designer Rob Gemmell in gray Nikes with cutting-edge Velcro straps, Steve showed up at work with a pair of his own. He sat in on meetings of the newly formed Apple design guild, where his being the only non-designer present did not stop him from offering merciless criticisms—a provocation some saw as presumptuous and others took as an invitation to push back or try to educate him.
He wanted to talk about everything he saw, and he wanted to see everything. He looked closely at kitchen appliances and VW vans, wine labels, gallery paintings, motorcycles, and telephones. He took the Macintosh team to San Francisco’s de Young Museum to see an exhibit of Tiffany lamps. He asked Joanna Hoffman, a Macintosh marketing manager, about the Issey Miyake-designed clothes she had saved her money to buy: Did she think their asymmetry and superlative craftsmanship could ever have wide appeal in the United States?
He was developing his eye, absorbing into his bones the lesson that good design is not mere decoration or ornament, but a paring away to help an object reveal its essence and, ultimately, evoke an emotional connection with its user.
Along with several Apple designers, he toyed with the idea of filling a room with objects they loved, then directing new hires to spend their first day at work in that room. He curated his own life, choosing to live in an empty space with just a few exquisite things—a Tiffany lamp, a custom-assembled stereo system.
Steve at home, sitting under his Tiffany lamp, photographed by Diana Walker in 1982
He later told an interviewer, “It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done, and then try to bring those things into what you are doing.”
He flew to Japan, where he met with Akio Morita, CEO of Sony, who gave him a first-generation Walkman, the portable music player Steve admired. He attended his first Aspen conference in 1981; the theme was “The Italian Idea,” and the work of designers such as Mario Bellini, Ettore Sottsass, Gae Aulenti, and Richard Sapper took center stage. He wrote to Mario Bellini and visited Italy to meet with Olivetti’s Ettore Sottsass. When Apple designers Gemmell and Manock proposed sponsoring a competition in which several top European designers would be invited to create a cohesive design language for a family of seven Apple products, Steve leapt at the idea.
By the spring of 1982, he was vowing, “I want our design not just to be the best in the personal computer industry, but the best in the world.”
No wonder he had prepared so carefully for the Aspen talk—he understood the opportunities and the stakes.
Back on stage, Steve has returned to his blue notebook. He talks about the computer in the context of other media, the evolution from radio to television to videodisc. He explains how email works, describes drawing with a computer and a mouse, imagines a world in which computers are portable but have “radio links,” narrates in great detail an interactive map he saw from MIT, tries to explain why computer programs are “archetypal,” and points to the possibility that one day we might be able, in any given situation, to ask a computer, “What would Aristotle have said?”—and get an answer.
MIT’s Aspen Movie Map, 1978–1980
The examples he offers demystify and catalyze in equal measure; they show what he is seeing, what others are imagining, and how it all fits together with breakthroughs that have come before. This is how Steve viewed innovation throughout his life: a constant accretion of what he called “sedimentary layers,” each one with the potential to raise humanity a bit higher, each generation building on the ideas of its predecessors.
Steve ends his speech and without a pause starts taking questions. Apart from scripted product demonstrations, he always preferred the give-and-take of Q&As over prepared remarks, and this talk is no exception. His formal comments in the blue notebook ran about 20 minutes, but the Q&A will last nearly twice as long. He has developed a rapport with the audience, and their questions cover a wide range of issues: networking, privacy, graphic design, hiring and recruiting, and voice recognition.
The biggest applause comes when Steve describes “Kids Can’t Wait,” Apple’s program to put a computer in every school in California. This audience of people who have never used computers now want their children to have access to them.
In response to a question about computer-based tools for graphic design, he lays out a much larger core ambition, one that will become a life-long theme. “We’re solving the problems of injecting some liberal arts into these computers,” he says. Computers should include multiple fonts and graphics because they are beautiful in themselves but also because they serve as the gateway to so much more. An engaging, easy-to-understand interface will help draw people to the computer, making it possible for them to discover new ideas and convey their own in new ways and with new tools.
“Where we’ve got to get to,” he says, is a place where no college student would think of writing a paper without a computer, where “people three, four years from now are using these things and they go, ‘Wasn’t this the way it always was?’” This sense of inevitability—so hard won, so hard to describe, and so obvious when achieved—is, for Steve, a hallmark of success. His sedimentary model of innovation works only if each generation takes the existing tools for granted.
Perhaps the most revealing moment in the Q&A comes when Steve is asked about Apple’s low rate of employee turnover. He starts to answer by talking about the wide distribution of stock options, then swerves to describe what he thinks really underpins people’s commitment to their work. “We feel that for some crazy reason we’re in the right place at the right time to put something back,” he says, pausing to collect his thoughts. “Most of us didn’t make the clothes we’re wearing, and we didn’t cook or grow the food that we eat, and we’re speaking a language that was developed by other people; we use mathematics that was developed by other people.” He is emphasizing every word. “We are constantly taking–and the ability to put something back into that pool of human experiences is extremely neat.” This desire to “put something back” would drive his work throughout his life.
The questions could go on, but Steve looks offstage and prompts, “I don’t know how much time we have?” As the crowd rises to their feet in a standing ovation, Steve picks up his coat off the floor, gives it a shake, and speeds up the aisle and out of the tent. A newspaper will later report, “An undercurrent was felt most of the day Wednesday and part of Thursday over whether Jobs was good or bad—visionary or huckster,” but Steve has no time for such debates. He has come to Aspen to speak but also to learn. Maya Lin, the 23-year-old student architect of the new stark and controversial Vietnam Veterans Memorial, is speaking nearby. He wants to hear her talk.
Steve’s Talk
Courtesy of GrassRoots Television
Before and After Steve’s Talk
Steve spoke at the Aspen Conference two other times in addition to his mainstage talk on the morning of June 15, 1983.
The night before, dressed in a leather bomber jacket and a button-down shirt, Steve gave a demonstration of the Lisa computer in what he called a “multimedia show.” That “show” has been lost, as has most of Steve’s presentation, but we have a few minutes of it.
Steve also spent 45 minutes in an informal Q&A session several hours after his mainstage talk. In New Balance sneakers, jeans, and a T-shirt from Ciao!, an Italian restaurant in San Francisco whose logo he loved, he sat backwards astride a metal folding chair and answered questions. Though the video shakes, the wind cuts through the audio, and questions are often muffled, Steve’s thoughts are worth sharing.
Here are a few of our favorite clips.
In this, our only clip from the footage of Steve’s Lisa demonstration on the evening of June 14, he draws parallels between the human brain and the computer.
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