Meta's Creative Studio Led by Former Apple Design Head to 'Treat Intelligence as a New Design Material' - MacRumors
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Meta's Creative Studio Led by Former Apple Design Head to 'Treat Intelligence as a New Design Material'

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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg today announced plans to launch a creative studio that will be led by former Apple UI designer Alan Dye. As we learned earlier today, Dye is leaving his position as Vice President of Human Interface Design at Apple to become ‌Meta‌'s new chief design officer.

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In a post on social media site Threads, Zuckerberg said that ‌Meta‌'s creative studio will merge design, fashion, and technology, while also treating intelligence as a "new design material."

The new studio will bring together design, fashion, and technology to define the next generation of our products and experiences. Our idea is to treat intelligence as a new design material and imagine what becomes possible when it is abundant, capable, and human-centered. We plan to elevate design within Meta, and pull together a talented group with a combination of craft, creative vision, systems thinking, and deep experience building iconic products that bridge hardware and software.

We're entering a new era where AI glasses and other devices will change how we connect with technology and each other. The potential is enormous, but what matters most is making these experiences feel natural and truly centered around people. With this new studio, we're focused on making every interaction thoughtful, intuitive, and built to serve people.

‌Meta‌ is also hiring another Apple designer, Billy Sorrentino, who has been on Apple's human interface design team for the last 10 years. Like Dye, Sorrentino worked on Apple's iOS 26 Liquid Glass redesign.

Along with the two former Apple designers, ‌Meta‌'s studio will include its existing industrial design team and its metaverse design and art teams.

‌Meta‌ currently sells its Quest VR headsets and AI smart glasses designed in collaboration with Ray-Ban and Oakley. ‌Meta‌ is aiming to expand further into hardware, and it is hard at work on a set of augmented reality glasses.

Alan Dye was one of Apple's few remaining designers that worked alongside Jony Ive. He originally joined Apple in 2006, transitioning to Ive's team in 2012 to work on iOS 7. He has been leading Apple's user interface design team since 2015, and will now start at ‌Meta‌ on December 31.

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Top Rated Comments

S
silvertech
8 months ago
What does that even mean?
Score: 34 Votes (Like | Disagree)
jz0309 Avatar
jz0309
8 months ago
Well, whatever you Zuck guys do, I will continue to not use your services and I will definitely never buy any hardware you develop.
End of story
Score: 31 Votes (Like | Disagree)
A
Art Mark
8 months ago
Facebook is a website. That sells ads. And no one under 40 goes there. And why are they still a thing?
Score: 27 Votes (Like | Disagree)
sully54 Avatar
sully54
8 months ago
I don't know. I think this may be a good thing for Apple in the end. Back in Steve's time, UI gave way to function. It complemented it instead of existing just because it looked good. But more recently and especially with Liquid Glass, things seem to have flipped and function now is secondary to the UI design and as a result, we have distracting elements and unreadable text.
Score: 16 Votes (Like | Disagree)
S
spunkystrawberries
8 months ago

I can’t be 100% sure if its’s DyeMs fault, but it seems like Apple’s user experience on all of their platforms has been going down the crapper since around the time Dye was in charge. If I remember right, Dye was originally the lead designer of Apple’s packaging. I get the sense that designing packages did not translate over to UX very well. This is my nice way of saying this is probably a good thing, as long as the next person who takes over actually knows what they’re doing, or that the problem isn’t higher up the ladder.
As someone who’s spent my entire career in UX, I can confidently say you’re circling an important point. Graphic design and user experience design are very different disciplines.

Dye came up through packaging and marketing, and that world is all about first impressions, drama, and the one-and-done moments that make something feel special. That skill set absolutely has value—but translating it into day-to-day interface design is a whole different beast. UX is about repeated interactions, edge cases, invisible logic, and making 10,000 tiny decisions line up so the experience holds up at scale. “Pretty” is the easy part; coherence over time is the hard part.

There’s definitely some overlap between Dye and Ive in terms of aesthetic conviction. To Ive’s credit, he at least understood what it meant for people to live with their devices day after day. But even he over-indexed on visual purity sometimes. iOS 7 is a perfect example of a design that photographed beautifully but wasn’t all that practical for real use.

So yeah, I don’t think it’s unfair to say Apple leaned very heavily into the “looks” side of design leadership during this era. Hopefully his successor has a deeper foundation in systems-level UX, not just surface-level polish.
Score: 12 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Edgecrusherr Avatar
Edgecrusherr
8 months ago
I can’t be 100% sure if its’s DyeMs fault, but it seems like Apple’s user experience on all of their platforms has been going down the crapper since around the time Dye was in charge. If I remember right, Dye was originally the lead designer of Apple’s packaging. I get the sense that designing packages did not translate over to UX very well. This is my nice way of saying this is probably a good thing, as long as the next person who takes over actually knows what they’re doing, or that the problem isn’t higher up the ladder.
Score: 10 Votes (Like | Disagree)
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