STEVE WOZNIAK
Steve Wozniak and the art of technology
Before his talk at the Turing Festival, Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, speaks to Gail Tolley about entrepreneurial spirit, technology in the arts and being an artist of a different kind
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C reativity and entrepreneurial neurial oursed long coursed of s veins of but, Edinburgh each August but, the the before rarely rarely Turing Festival, -edge took the form of cutting-edge and thinking in computing and more technology. That’s been more year than compensated for this year pple though with the news that Apple will co-founder Steve Wozniak will note be giving the Festival’s keynote address.
rld’s In the context of the world’s niak largest arts festival Wozniak the is an exciting presence in the ose city, highlighting the close vity relationship between creativity y in in technology and creativity in the arts.
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built ak In the early 1970s Wozniak he the designed at operating system for what le the Apple would become at I. In 1976 he quit his job at g Hewlett Packard and, along d with Steve Jobs, formed h Apple Computer, which y would go on to be a key f player in the development of the PC.
s ‘When we started I was t actually termed an artist but of a different type,’ Wozniak explains. ‘I was the type who knew how to work with chips and circuits, and the way I connected wires was like i ne a very i ne artist or a very i ne st any other human musician, better than almost any other human being could do. That was a different type of art, you don’t see that art very much anymore.’ Such an appreciation of the art of technology has dei ned Apple, a company which more than any other encapsulates the possibilities of impeccable design working hand-in-hand with the best in engineering. ‘From the very start, one of the things we were into was a type of aesthetic that was a technical way of making things very simple, very usable,’ Wozniak says. ‘It’s very different to the way a lot of engineers think and we got noted for that, it became a part of our culture. It’s how things look to the eye that communicate little keys about how we
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recognised of creative person isn’t in school. At school you get taught that there’s always right a answer and it’s not y your right answer, it c came out of a book. A l lot of people just grew u up too rigidly. That’s a p problem with today’s ed education and I hope it ch changes someday when co computers become hu human enough to be real tea teachers.’ Only then, he be believes, will students be be able the ind individual attention in the cla classroom that’s really nee needed. Th Through teaching he has also also seen the opportunities that that technology offers for for his students interested in t in the arts. ‘Artists have alwa always looked for new ways ways to explore things but in th in the past they have been restri restricted by the physical medi media they had to use. Now with with computers the media can b can be virtual or augmented reality reality. In other words you don’t don’t have to obey the laws of phy of physics. You see a lot of this h this happening in the game world world for example.’
‘VISUAL AESTHETICS ARE VERY IMPORTANT TO APPLE’
use them very quickly. So visual use them very quickly. So visual aesthetics have always been very important to Apple.’ Alongside his dei ning work with Apple, Wozniak has also worked as a teacher and supported many educational initiatives. Having dropped out of Berkeley before i nishing his degree, Wozniak is acutely aware of the limitations that the education system offers in fostering entrepreneurial thinking, and he believes that in the future technology might hold the answer here too. ‘The student who’s trying to think creatively or working inwardly trying to i gure things out in minute detail, that’s the sort of person that gets ignored. Often that kind
So w So what can we expect from from Wozniak’s Edinburgh event? event? The creation of Apple, the d the development of the personal computing project and ideas of creativity and entrepreneurship are all on the cards. ‘I’m going to give examples of creativity and talk about the importance of engineering and technologists, and how easy it is to do something the second time and not the i rst time. I especially want to focus more than anything else on the future of technology as I see it.’ And that in itself sounds like a vision worth listening to. Steve Wozniak is speaking at the Edinburgh Playhouse, 0844 871 3014, Thu 23 Aug as part of the Turing Festival.
16–23 Aug 2012 THE LIST 19