How nature inspires us

Nature makes the best medicine, did you know that? Well, you do now! But nature doesn't make computers (well...) or passenger aircraft. So we have to invent them. But we find that sometimes our machines work better if we do more than simply apply the mere laws of nature (read physics). Sometimes we have to step back from the fundamentals (technical laws) and see the big picture. Leonardo da Vinci saw how powerful and inspiring nature was, and so do many designers and engineers. Nature can be baroque, it can be minimalistic, it can be abstract, it can be surreal. So we have a lot to choose from.

So how does nature inspire us here at Apple? Well, it's not always obvious. But have a look at this 'hockey puck' mouse we did back in '98 for the first iMac:



We based that on something so simple you'll probably gasp: a drop of water at rest. Brilliant or what? But the problem was that due to its regular shape, the user had to keep looking at it to ensure it was correctly oriented (we made a similar mistake but in a different way some years later - can you guess?). I don't mind that we had to change it. But the worst thing was hearing it referred to as a hockey puck. Nobody in the popular press has ever called it the 'water drop' mouse. Which would have been brilliant because a couple of years later the company released OS X and its interface was called... Aqua.