In 1996, while he was still the CEO of NeXT, Steve Jobs was inter­viewed by Wired writer Gary Wolf. The result was a some­times quaint, occa­sion­ally prophetic and often pes­simistic exchange.

In this far-reaching (and some­what lengthy) dis­cus­sion with Steve Jobs, the two dis­cuss the forth­com­ing ubiq­uity of “the web dial tone”, how tech­nol­ogy doesn’t change the world and this on the true mean­ing of design and creativity:

Design is a funny word. Some peo­ple think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn’t what it looked like, although that was part of it. Pri­mar­ily, it was how it worked. To design some­thing really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a pas­sion­ate com­mit­ment to really thor­oughly under­stand some­thing, chew it up, not just quickly swal­low it. Most peo­ple don’t take the time to do that.

Cre­ativ­ity is just con­nect­ing things. When you ask cre­ative peo­ple how they did some­thing, they feel a lit­tle guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw some­thing. It seemed obvi­ous to them after a while. That’s because they were able to con­nect expe­ri­ences they’ve had and syn­the­size new things. And the rea­son they were able to do that was that they’ve had more expe­ri­ences or they have thought more about their expe­ri­ences than other people.

Unfor­tu­nately, that’s too rare a com­mod­ity. A lot of peo­ple in our indus­try haven’t had very diverse expe­ri­ences. So they don’t have enough dots to con­nect, and they end up with very lin­ear solu­tions with­out a broad per­spec­tive on the prob­lem. The broader one’s under­stand­ing of the human expe­ri­ence, the bet­ter design we will have.

via @tcarmody