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Dieter Rams is often considered to be the greatest industrial designer of our time, and the work of Apple’s Jonny Ive is often cited as being obviously influence by his school of thought. Some have said Ive’s work (which many argue can be summed up in the iconic design of the iPhone 4/4S) is almost like a love letter to Dieter Rams.

I like to break programmers up in to two schools; academic problem solvers and creative problem solvers. Academic programmers could also be called true computer scientists. And for many of us, function and productivity are so supreme that outward appearance is completely meaningless (see: vim, emacs, most Linux distributions, neckbeards, nerd fashion). This bleeds over a little in to the software engineers, but when you start to get in to the realm of OS X/iOS app devs, web designers, and the like you start to meet up with the creative problem solvers.

For us Academic nerds, we can lose sight of how important good design is because so frequently we just don’t care, and what I have always loved about Dieter Rams and Jonny Ive is how truly and totally they believe in and act upon the ethos that they have set forth; that their design looks good for a reason. To make the objects understandable, functional, but still beautiful. Engineering a truly great product doesn’t just mean making sure it works well, but that it is easy to make it work and that you actually want to use it. And when you can combine all three of those factors to crank out truly stunning objects that are both a pleasure to use and to own, then you’ve done a really fantastic job. That’s what I love about Apple, and that’s what I love about this sit down with Dieter Rams.