Robert Brunner on Prototyping Your Life, Leaving Apple, and Forging Beats by Dre - Yanko Design
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Robert Brunner on Prototyping Your Life, Leaving Apple, and Forging Beats by Dre - Yanko Design
"The fifth episode features none other than Robert Brunner, a true titan of industrial design. Brunner is renowned as the founder of Ammunition Design, the studio behind the iconic Beats by Dre headphones, as well as collaborations with Polaroid, Ember, Square, and many more. His career has spanned from co-founding Luna Design in the early 1980s to serving as Apple's Director of Industrial Design, where he established the company's influential internal design organization and even championed Jonathan Ive as his successor."
"Robert Brunner's storied career is a masterclass in what he terms "prototyping your life." He approaches each major pivot not as a leap of faith, but as a calculated design project, complete with research, testing, and iteration. This mindset reframes a career path from a linear progression into a dynamic series of experiments. "I've always had some sort of underlying plan in what I wanted to do, but really sort of working through how I wanted to design that plan to happen," Brunner explains."
Design Mindset is a weekly podcast premiering every Friday that explores the journeys, philosophies, and creative risks behind influential designers and innovators. Each episode features in-depth interviews that examine career highs and pivotal moments of reinvention that define creative leadership. The fifth episode spotlights Robert Brunner, founder of Ammunition Design and former Director of Industrial Design at Apple, with work including Beats by Dre and collaborations with Polaroid, Ember, and Square. Brunner reframes major career pivots as deliberate design projects, emphasizing research, testing, iteration, and staged implementation. He describes this approach as "prototyping your life" and applies planning and experimentation to professional decisions.
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