The Spaceship Dyslexia Built

I was recently reading One More Thing: Inside Apple’s Insanely Great (or Just Insane) New Mothership, the Wired cover article on Apple’s new headquarters, which has been dubbed The Spaceship.

I read about Steve Jobs’ vision for a new campus for Apple, the company he co-founded, and his presentation to the Cupertino City Counsel in 2011. The article recounts how he hired famed architect Norman Foster to bring the building to life after the two connected on Jobs’ vision.

The article also described the myriad of design contributions made to the new building by Apple’s Chief Design Officer Jony Ive, who famously also connected with Jobs over his vision for Apple’s products and their world-class product design.

Reading the article, it struck me that Jobs, Foster and Ive might all have something in common given their amazing creativity and their ability to collaborate so well. A few quick searches later about each of them and my suspicion was confirmed. Some of the most successful entrepreneurs, architects and designers in history have been dyslexic so it was not surprising that Jobs, Foster and Ive are/were all dyslexic.

However, while it was easy to find that each was dyslexic, I couldn’t find anything written about the fact that all three are dyslexic and that Apple’s new headquarters is, really, the spaceship that dyslexia built.

Given the myriad of misconceptions about dyslexia, this is a story that is worthy of much press. I’m hopeful others will pick up this story and run with it.