Editors’ Note: Details from this post appeared in similar form in a July, 2011, piece by Jonah Lehrer for Wired magazine, U.K. We regret the duplication of material.
On January 30, 1986, shortly after he was forced out of Apple Computer (and years before his return), Steve Jobs bought a small computer manufacturer named Pixar from George Lucas, the director of Star Wars. While the Pixar team had produced a few impressive animated shorts for marketing purposes—“The Adventures of Andre and Wally B” is widely credited with spurring Hollywood’s interest in digital animation—Jobs was most interested in the Pixar Image Computer, a $125,000 machine capable of generating complex graphic visualizations.
Unfortunately, the expensive computers were a commercial flop. Jobs was forced to extend a personal line of credit to Pixar, which lost more than $8.3 million in 1990 alone. His first post-Apple investment was in danger of failing. “We should have failed,” Alvy Ray Smith, a co-founder of Pixar, says in David Price’s “The Pixar Touch.” “But it seemed to me that Steve would just not suffer a defeat. He couldn’t sustain it.”
The survival of Pixar, and its subsequent rise, is a revealing case study in Jobs’s approach to innovation. Although Jobs’s background was in computer hardware, he helped transform Pixar into a movie-making powerhouse, one of the most successful studios in the history of cinema. Since 1995, when the first “Toy Story” was released, Pixar has created twelve feature films. Every one of those films has been a commercial success, with an average international gross of more than $550 million per film. Not even Apple has enjoyed that kind of streak.
When introducing the iPad 2 in March, Jobs summarized his strategy this way: “It is in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.” Such platitudes are common in Silicon Valley, where executives routinely introduce shiny gadgets with lofty language. But what set all of Jobs’s companies apart, from Pixar to NeXT to Apple, was, indeed, an insistence that computer scientists must work together with artists and designers—that the best ideas emerge from the intersection of technology and the humanities. “One of the greatest achievements at Pixar was that we brought these two cultures together and got them working side by side,” Jobs said in 2003.
This faith in the liberal arts is rooted in Job’s own biography. He famously dropped out of Reed College his freshman year, but continued to audit classes in calligraphy:
Perhaps the clearest demonstration can be seen in the design of the Pixar campus. In November, 2000, Jobs purchased an abandoned Del Monte canning factory on sixteen acres in Emeryille, just north of Oakland. The original architectural plan called for three buildings, with separate offices for the computer scientists, the animators, and the Pixar executives. Jobs immediately scrapped it. (“We used to joke that the building was Steve’s movie,” Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar, told me last year.) Instead of three buildings, there was going to be a single vast space, with an airy atrium at its center. “The philosophy behind this design is that it’s good to put the most important function at the heart of the building,” Catmull said. “Well, what’s our most important function? It’s the interaction of our employees. That’s why Steve put a big empty space there. He wanted to create an open area for people to always be talking to each other.”
Jobs realized, however, that it wasn’t enough to simply create a space: he needed to make people go there. As he saw it, the main challenge for Pixar was getting its different cultures to work together, forcing the computer geeks and cartoonists to collaborate. (John Lasseter, the chief creative officer at Pixar, describes the equation this way: “Technology inspires art, and art challenges the technology.”) In typical fashion, Jobs saw this as a design problem. He began with the mailboxes, which he shifted to the atrium. Then he moved the meeting rooms to the center of the building, followed by the cafeteria and the coffee bar and the gift shop. But that still wasn’t enough; Jobs insisted that the architects locate the only set of bathrooms in the atrium. (He was later forced to compromise on this detail.) In a 2008 conversation, Brad Bird, the director of “The Incredibles” and “Ratatouille,” said, “The atrium initially might seem like a waste of space…. But Steve realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen.”
That emphasis on consilience, even if it came at the expense of convenience, has always been a defining trait of Steve Jobs. In an age of intellectual fragmentation, Jobs insisted that the best creations occurred when people from disparate fields were connected together, when our distinct ways of seeing the world were brought to bear on a singular problem. It’s what happens when a calligrapher designs a computer font and when an animator strikes up a conversation with a programmer at the bathroom sink. The Latin crest of Pixar University says it all: Alienus Non Diutius. Alone no longer.
