Elon Musk is doing something even more interesting design wise, than Jobs did. Jobs imported decades old German modernist product design, which, unlike architecture, never really made it to the US, and applied Bauhaus modernism to software design. Musk is postmodern...
...in the best way. He's using retro cultural influences, Flash Gordon era rockets and Stealth Fighter like, origami style, car design from 70s Lotus, to deliberately invert the current norm and show that you can be playful with products that are much more ambitious than Apple's.
You can tell at a glance that this is real design in the sense of a human being making creative choices, rather than abrogation through focus groups under the euphemism of 'human centric design' (which is really the opposite).
And it's now shifting into a new gear at both SpaceX and Tesla, where the exterior of both rockets and cars were, until recently, conventional and most of the innovation was in the interior, getting rid of buttons and dials and replacing them with screens.
Postmodernism in literature and social science is largely toxic bullshit and unrelated to it's meaning in design. In architecture it ended up being tame but in product design, Musk could take it to a new level.
Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.
A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.
