“If there is a God in design, he’s probably called Jony Ive”

The tech world has always struggled with design. To understand what it is, what it does, how it can help, and how it can structure and manage technologies to create compelling user experiences.

Silicon Valley is, after all, a science- and engineering-driven culture, shaped by commercial interests.

Steve Jobs understood the connection between inspiration, creative expression and these new tools that would enable them. Design at Apple was integral.

While Jobs was clearly technically advanced, he always understood the need to manifest technology through design in order to delight consumers and draw consumers in.

Those consumers would only form the desired impression if the hardware products bore the values of the software within. And as Apple controlled the whole stack, only they could define every facet and feature in this way.

While the AI hype has been foaming uncontrollably for some years now, it still seems largely abstract and hard to quantify in the mind. We know it’s huge, but there’s nothing to see.

Yes, the outputs, from synthetic video to vibe code apps, are incredibly impressive. But the interface couldn’t be more humdrum. And the outputs are still recognisably collateral from the previous era.

Visualising AI’s future

AI is a phenomenon without a body. If this really is a revolution, where’s the change I can observe?

With OpenAI now trading at over $300 billion, and with the cash burn running at intense levels to sustain this, Sam Altman must keep the excitement and exuberance riding high, because the actual numbers won’t deliver against this valuation for some time (and may never do so).

The strategy, of course, is to fan the flames, to bring new stories into the mix to keep momentum going while the real demand and real commercials mature and, hopefully, meet the hype at just the right moment on the graph.

Not only does OpenAI need to keep interest growing, but they also have to stave off a growing community of competitors. While AI tools’ performance benchmarks may change day by day, the playing field is somewhat level. Some days it’s not clear if there’s any real daylight between them.

“This is the world’s most exciting product design brief, and we’ve handed it to the world’s leading product designer.”

Enter Jony Ive. It was reported OpenAI paid $6billion for io, Ive’s hardware company.

That seems like a crazy amount of money to spend on a company that’s barely even trading. But then, what’s it worth to have an edge in a competitive market at this scale and where the stakes are so high?

What’s it worth to have a new story to bolster the vision that’s kept investors so excited?

The way to view this is simply as an equation:

$300+ billion + Jony Ive = what? You could easily argue that Jony Ive equals a greater than $6 billion in that calculus.

A new era of devices

To make AI even more compelling as a growth story, it would be incredibly helpful to start seeing how AI features and applications will spawn their own devices and start to penetrate the physical world.

In this thesis, investors may see a replay of what happened with the iPod, which turned into the iPhone, which became the best-selling product of all time, with some of the highest margins ever witnessed in any category.

So this is the world’s most exciting product design brief, and we’ve handed it to the world’s leading product designer by reputation.

With stakes this high, in an industry that still fails to fully understand design, Ive is the ideal candidate. He’s done it before, more than once.

His presence and association will give partners, collaborators, retailers, and consumers confidence in his judgment and in the products he endorses.

His commitment alone signals a degree of seriousness and intention. These all have substantial worth.

The truth is that no-one knows what the hit products will be, what the iPod or iPhone of AI will look like. It’s too early to tell, partly because of the rampant pace of current development.

We don’t know what we’ll use, why we’ll use it, what it will cost, or how we’ll consume it. We don’t know if we’ll wear it on our wrists, on our faces, or on our shirts.

Will we want a button we can press, or will we be happy to share every spoken word and event in our lives to gain maximum assistance from a device that can learn from anything and everything around us? Or is that a step too far?

Reaching for religion

The context is constantly changing. It’s in these moments, when we have an intense need answers, we reach for religions. And, if there is a God in design, he’s probably called Jony Ive.

I won’t pretend to be prophetic and tell you whether this will work.

My biggest concern is whether the funding can continue at a high enough rate to keep the lights on for this whole endeavour, in time for real revenue to catch up and sustain them in the long run.

A hit device (or devices) may help perpetuate the hype and, in time, establish a sustainable model, just like iPhone sales and the whole App Store infrastructure sustain Apple as a multi-trillion dollar company.

Nicolas Roope is a designer, creative technologist and entrepreneur who previously co-founded Poke, Plumen and The Lovie Awards.