A meeting of minds

Prince Charles and Jony Ive’s Terra Carta Design Lab celebrates the work of young designers in developing high-impact, low-cost solutions to the climate crisis

- By Deyan Sudjic

Jony Ive signs off the website of his creative collective, LoveFrom, with two startling, contradictory words: ‘Love’ and ‘Fury’, connecting them with a meticulously drawn ampersand. They suggest a more complicated and surprising designer than the purist who gave the enigmatic first-generation iPhone its Dieter Ramsinspired calculator interface.

Ive is unfailingly polite, solicitous and considerate in conversation, and yet every so often he uses the word ‘fury’ or ‘furious’, or ‘angry’. It makes him sound a bit like William Morris, who gave up design to campaign for socialism, complaining within the hearing of his clients of spending his life ‘ministering to the swinish luxury of the rich’. Ive certainly isn’t giving up design, but he suggests that, when discussing work in his studio, he is sometimes arguing with himself: ‘mostly it is an internal monologue’. He belongs to a generation of designers who grew up reading Victor Papanek’s Design for the Real World, which made the notorious claim that ‘there are professions more dangerous than industrial design, but not many.’

His career to date has been inextricably associated with the giant company that has done more than most to define modern industrial production, and perhaps even modern life. Though he stepped down from the chief design officer role in 2019, he still has Apple as a client, as well as Ferrari and Airbnb.