Jonathan Ive's fidget widget
Apple's industrial design lead Jonathan Ive is one of those ultimately profilable characters, an industry superstar with a compelling philosophy (a ready-made metanarrative for profile writers). BusinessWeek just published a profile useful as an intro to Ive. For those who already know him, the angle isn't anything suprising, but it does include some clever stories:
He created a pen that had a ball and clip mechanism on top, for no purpose other than to give the owner something to fiddle with. "It immediately became the owner's prize possession, something you always wanted to play with...We began to call it 'having Jony-ness,' an extra something that would tap into the product's underlying emotion."
