Sir Jonathan Ive has won the British Visionary Innovator 2012 award organised by the Intellectual Property Office. The award comes after the competition was open for seven days and allowed the public to vote for their most innovative person of 2012.

After a week of voting, you have chosen Sir Jonathan Ive as your favourite British Visionary Innovator for 2012. He received 46.6% of your votes, making him the clear favourite amongst a list of other hugely talented, creative and innovative people.

Source: Intellectual Property Office

UK news paper, The Sunday Times is reporting that Jonathan Ive, the Senior Vice President of Industrial Design at Apple, wants to return to the UK to live! Ive is the principal designer of the iMac, MacBook, unibody MacBook Pro, iPod, iPhone, and iPad.

Ive supposedly wishes to commute to Cupertino from his home, which is based in Somerset, England, and the Apple board is not exactly thrilled by the idea. A friend of Ive’s family has allegedly confirmed the dispute and told The Sunday Times:

“Unfortunately he is just too valuable to Apple and they told him in no uncertain terms that if he headed back to England he would not be able to sustain his position with them.”

[Cult of Mac]

Got a video camera with a nightvision (infrared) setting? Grab your iPhone and take a look at the left-rear of the phone, as fskj85 of Austrialian Whirlpool did, and you'll see the snazzy "Data Matrix Code" underneath the body of the device. Wazzat, you ask? It's essentially a two-dimensional bar code (many Nokia phones are able to photograph these to get links to downloads, for example). Apparently the plastic in that section is transparent to infrared light, allowing you to see the matrix underneath. That's some secret-agent-design right there, folks, somebody nominate Jonathan Ives as the next James Bond.

Engadget Mobile, where we first saw the story, posits that the matrix likely encodes the IMEI and the Serial for the iPhone. That information is also printed in human-readable form on the SIM-card tray, but since that tray could technically be removed / swapped into another iPhone, it makes sense that Apple would find a way to get that data onto the iPhone itself.

That, or Apple is secretly tracking us with every camera we pass by.

At the rate Apple's Vice President of Design keeps winning awards for the iPhone, he's going to need a bigger mantle! Last time it was the unprecedented (and continued!) domination of the uber-elite Black Pencil, now it's the Mobile Data Association 2008 MDA Personal Achievement Award.

Said the judges of Ive's iPhone design:

"It sets the bar very high for all present and future competitors and as such, is shaking the mobile phone industry. We look forward to seeing Ive's design innovation continuing to challenge the mobile world."

They're right. For the last long while, when it comes to consumer electronic design, there's been Apple's Ive and pretty much nobody else.

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If Steve Jobs is the patron behind the concept of the iPhone, then Jonathan Ive is certainly the artist whose hand crafted its ultimate realization.

Apple's reclusive Vice President of Design recently spoke with the Independant's Claire Beale on the nature of design, winning an unprecedented six (6!) Black Pencil awards, and what drives Apple's success:

"We have a very clear focus that all the development teams at Apple share, a focus around trying to make really great products. That can sound ridiculously simplistic, almost naive, but it's very unique for the product to be what consumes you completely. And when I say the product I mean the product in its total sense, the hardware and the software, the complete experience that people will have. We push each other, we're very self-critical and we'll take the time to get the product right."

Witness, of course, the iPhone.

Be sure to hit the read link for the complete article.

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The D&AD Black Pencil, an award so prestigious they would rather not give it away at all than give it to just any flashy objet-de-ans, is now joining what must be a mantle-straining load down at Apple Design VP Jonathan Ive's house.

Steve Jobs, Ive, and their iPhone, which has already been cleaning up on the award circuit, secured the creative industry's top prize, with a second award being given to the latest aluminum iMac as well.

This makes 6 total Black Pencils (and "innumerable", if lesser, Yellow Pencils) for Apple and Ive, the most for any company since the D&AD began handing out the trophy instruments back in 1963.

Makes sense. Apple not only cares deeply about design, but understands how form is inextricably linked to function.

Congrats!

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Sramana Mitra has an interesting post up comparing Apple to Palm. Actually, she's been on a tear lately when it comes to Palm and how they've dropped the corporate management ball. She scored a comprehensive interview with former Palm Executive Eric Benhamou, which reads very nicely but is also a clear example of how the problems Palm has now are the direct result of their earlier problems. Basically they followed the exact opposite trajectory that Apple did in nearly the same time period (basically).

Anyway, back to the intersection of the two companies. Mitra writes:

Rubinstein and Jobs could not agree on the iPhone’s strategy wrt the Keyboard. This tells me that Rubinstein has a separate but perhaps also compelling vision on how the keyboard needs to be incorporated into smartphones. I can’t wait to see what that vision entails!

John Rubinstein (Palm) vs. Steve Jobs (iPhone) - Sramana Mitra on Strategy

It's surely not the case (one assumes) that Rubenstein left Apple over the keyboard issue (though that would be hilarious); but it is interesting that the guy who ran the iPod division, the podfather himself, was pro-physical-keyboard for the iPhone. Now, of course, he's hard at work over at Palm, they who basically specialize in keyboard + touchscreen smartphones.

One wonders what other ideas Rubenstein had that didn't make the cut on the iPhone. If "Podfather" Rubenstein's input was 86'd on the iPhone, then one assumes that it was all Ive and Jobs, just like everybody's always said.

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