From an article by Daniel Turner from Technology Review about Apple and the pursuit of great industrial design. The process employed and the reasoning for this as a productive investment for those who use their products. I have to say I have never thought of Apple products in this way but it is interesting to hear from the designers perspective and understand how such a large company uses “one mind” approach to good design. How many of us have to design for a committee structure?

Apple’s designs are now the stuff of legend–and the object of fascination and envy. But is the focus on design worth it? Why spend time and money making a computer look good? Why do we care what it looks like?

“Attractive things work better,” says Don Norman, who was vice president of advanced technology at Apple from 1993 to 1998. “When you wash and wax a car, it drives better, doesn’t it? Or at least feels like it does.”

Norman cites research in cognitive science suggesting that people’s emotions affect the way their minds process information. In his 2004 book Emotional Design, he writes, “Positive emotions are critical to learning, curiosity, and creative thought. … The psychologist Alice Isen and her colleagues have shown that being happy broadens the thought processes and facilitates creative thinking.”

In multiple studies, Isen, a professor of psychology and S. C. Johnson Professor of Marketing at Cornell University, made subjects feel happy through a number of means, including gifts of candy and words or pictures with pleasant associations. The subjects were then asked to perform tasks that measure creativity; over the course of 20 years, Isen and her colleagues regularly found that subjects exhibited much more creativity when they were in a good mood.