At The Intersection of Technology and Liberal Arts

When Apple (AAPL) announced the iPad, their latest creation, on Januarary 27th Steve Jobs closed with a very interesting glimpse into how Apple creates game-changing products in the highly competitive, and highly saturated, mobile marketplace. In Steve’s words:

“We’ve always tried to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts, to be able to get the best of both, to make extremely advanced products from a technology point of view, but also have them be intuitive, easy to use, fun to use, so that they really fit the users – the users don’t have to come to them, they come to the user.”

His words felt more like fatherly advice than a mission statement. In the past, technology companies focused on technology for technology sake: Success was measured by results coming from high technical goals, yet low human interface goals. Mr Jobs was telling the world that Apple has always chosen technology to serve the person with whom the device is interacting.

Apple A4 Processor

Another glimpse was given into how Apple actually drives through this intersection of technology and liberal arts. Apple’s Hardware VP, Bob Mansfield, talked about the new processor designed by Apple, the A4, and how the hardware and software teams worked in concert to create a processor to help Apple meet high user interface design goals. Many companies tend to silo-off their hardware and software teams. Touch devices like the iPhone have shown us we live in a software-driven hardware world. The makers of these devices must behave accordingly in order to create compelling experiences that compete with what Apple has created thus far.

Many organizations seem to understand at a certain level that this intersection is important for success. The creation of design departments within their engineering departments seem to allude to this understanding. However, getting the various disciplines to work in concert is another challenge altogether.