Lamilia
New Member
i got this by email:
There is something a little off here: The designer of the Microsoft Xbox 360 doesn't play video games
"No, I'm not a gamer. Um, do you have to write that?" Jonathan Hayes said.
Everything about the look of the new Xbox - its shape, its color, its feel - is a dramatic change from the first Xbox, Hayes says. The old game console, which came out in the not-so-very-old year of 2001, is a bulky, black square thing.
Its reincarnation is a sleek, off-white, curvy vessel, like something out of a store that is part Pottery Barn, part Sharper Image. It's as if Microsoft's new baby, with two versions priced at $299 and $399 and expected to sell 3 million units in 90 days, has gone through a nip-tuck, and Hayes, scalpel in hand, directed the surgery.
When he says that the Xbox "doesn't look like anything you've seen before in game consoles - not the NES, not Sega, not PlayStation," he's really speaking of himself. He is a 37-year-old misfit, a self-described "weird, idiosyncratic guy," a hardware designer in a software company full of engineers.
There's a history behind this.
He was the kind of kid at Amherst, the prestigious liberal arts college in Massachusetts, who wrote his thesis on wood as a material for sculpture.
His friends "looked at me like I was a bit of a wacko," he recalls. He then went on to get a master's in industrial design at the Rhode Island School of Design, "and I wasn't wearing my black turtleneck or chain-smoking," he says with a laugh.
Years later, at Microsoft, where he has been since 1997, helping design a joystick, a mouse, a keyboard and a cell phone before moving on to the Xbox, he continues to see himself as an outsider.
After landing the job to give that increasingly ubiquitous bit of furniture, the game console, a new look, he remembers J Allard, the Xbox's big boss, telling him: "Gaming is not a very mature field."
"J was in a sense worried that I would bring in too much high design - you know, too much philosophy," explains Hayes, who resides in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood and whose low-tech living room features lots of books.
"At Xbox, we're loaded with people who are off the charts in their technical understanding," Hayes continues. "My job isn't to compete in that front. My job is to produce a counterweight to that."
Hayes, who took charge of the Xbox in September 2003, leads a global group of about two dozen designers - West meets East, from San Francisco and Osaka, Japan. For the past two years, he's been shuttling back and forth, always on "enthusiasm overdrive - a type double-A personality who's on 24/7," says Brett Lovelady, president and founder of the San Francisco contingent, Astro Studio, which achieved renown for its S-shape Nike sports watches.
"The machine's purity of line and form - I mean, it looks like a ceramic piece - that's Jon's influence," Lovelady says.
"For this new Xbox, it was very important to bring in a fresh set of eyes in how we think about what it should look like," adds Don Coyner, who helped hire Hayes to the Xbox 360 team.
Hayes has an artistic sensibility that is at once classic and contemporary. The inspiration for the Xbox 360, he says, is a Constantin Brancusi sculpture from the 1920s.
"Go to Google. Click on 'images.' Type in 'Bird in Space,' " he instructs. "It traces a bird's flight. It captures the essence of upward thrust."
His favorite piece of art is Picasso's "Guernica" - "It's about the horror of war, the best and worst of what humans can be, and it knocks the wind out of you."
He quotes a line in a biography of the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe that reads: "I look for beauty and I express it as truthfully as I can."
"For me, it's the opposite," Hayes says. "I look for truth, and I express it as beautifully as I can
There is something a little off here: The designer of the Microsoft Xbox 360 doesn't play video games
"No, I'm not a gamer. Um, do you have to write that?" Jonathan Hayes said.
Everything about the look of the new Xbox - its shape, its color, its feel - is a dramatic change from the first Xbox, Hayes says. The old game console, which came out in the not-so-very-old year of 2001, is a bulky, black square thing.
Its reincarnation is a sleek, off-white, curvy vessel, like something out of a store that is part Pottery Barn, part Sharper Image. It's as if Microsoft's new baby, with two versions priced at $299 and $399 and expected to sell 3 million units in 90 days, has gone through a nip-tuck, and Hayes, scalpel in hand, directed the surgery.
When he says that the Xbox "doesn't look like anything you've seen before in game consoles - not the NES, not Sega, not PlayStation," he's really speaking of himself. He is a 37-year-old misfit, a self-described "weird, idiosyncratic guy," a hardware designer in a software company full of engineers.
There's a history behind this.
He was the kind of kid at Amherst, the prestigious liberal arts college in Massachusetts, who wrote his thesis on wood as a material for sculpture.
His friends "looked at me like I was a bit of a wacko," he recalls. He then went on to get a master's in industrial design at the Rhode Island School of Design, "and I wasn't wearing my black turtleneck or chain-smoking," he says with a laugh.
Years later, at Microsoft, where he has been since 1997, helping design a joystick, a mouse, a keyboard and a cell phone before moving on to the Xbox, he continues to see himself as an outsider.
After landing the job to give that increasingly ubiquitous bit of furniture, the game console, a new look, he remembers J Allard, the Xbox's big boss, telling him: "Gaming is not a very mature field."
"J was in a sense worried that I would bring in too much high design - you know, too much philosophy," explains Hayes, who resides in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood and whose low-tech living room features lots of books.
"At Xbox, we're loaded with people who are off the charts in their technical understanding," Hayes continues. "My job isn't to compete in that front. My job is to produce a counterweight to that."
Hayes, who took charge of the Xbox in September 2003, leads a global group of about two dozen designers - West meets East, from San Francisco and Osaka, Japan. For the past two years, he's been shuttling back and forth, always on "enthusiasm overdrive - a type double-A personality who's on 24/7," says Brett Lovelady, president and founder of the San Francisco contingent, Astro Studio, which achieved renown for its S-shape Nike sports watches.
"The machine's purity of line and form - I mean, it looks like a ceramic piece - that's Jon's influence," Lovelady says.
"For this new Xbox, it was very important to bring in a fresh set of eyes in how we think about what it should look like," adds Don Coyner, who helped hire Hayes to the Xbox 360 team.
Hayes has an artistic sensibility that is at once classic and contemporary. The inspiration for the Xbox 360, he says, is a Constantin Brancusi sculpture from the 1920s.
"Go to Google. Click on 'images.' Type in 'Bird in Space,' " he instructs. "It traces a bird's flight. It captures the essence of upward thrust."
His favorite piece of art is Picasso's "Guernica" - "It's about the horror of war, the best and worst of what humans can be, and it knocks the wind out of you."
He quotes a line in a biography of the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe that reads: "I look for beauty and I express it as truthfully as I can."
"For me, it's the opposite," Hayes says. "I look for truth, and I express it as beautifully as I can
