Make It New: A History of Silicon Valley Design by Barry M. Katz (review)

Most adult Americans know the story of how Steve Jobs transformed consumer electronics by making various Apple products seem not only useful and innovative, but also beautiful. In so doing he became in his short life that rare person for whom the title "living legend" was not hyperbole. In his splendid book Make It New, Barry M. Katz places Jobs in a trajectory whereby attention to design migrated from being an afterthought in a product's development to being essential to its conceptualization. Not surprisingly, Katz maintains that Jobs was a "hinge" on which the history he is chronicling pivots.

The author begins, appropriately, with the agricultural past of the Santa Clara Valley, which began to be called Silicon Valley in the early 1970s. Little-known outside of California is the fact that the area was once home to the world's largest orchard, a sea of apricot, cherry, and pear trees, some 100,000 acres in all. But after World War II, military contractors started to move in, and the orchards began to be cut down. Lockheed Missiles and Space was the largest private employer, with facilities in both Sunnyvale and Palo Alto and a workforce approaching 25,000 at its peak. One of my few criticisms of this book is that Katz does not pay enough attention to the defense industry presence, given that this industry constituted the main market for electronics goods in the early stages of the Valley's rise to prominence as a hub of high tech. And Uncle Sam was not much interested in design.

Another shortfall is the lack of attention to Russell and Sigurd Varian, two brothers who invented the klystron tube in the 1930s, with $100 in seed money from Stanford University. The importance of these brothers lies not only in the fact that the firm they founded in the 1940s, Varian Associates, would be the first tenant at Stanford Industrial Park in the 1950s, but also in their being proto-hippies, entrepreneurs whose style would have made them unlikely business leaders anyplace other than the Bay Area, with its history as a home to unconventional people. The brothers belong in the Valley's genealogy, because they were a foretaste of what was to come. Their success made that of Steve Jobs more likely.

These lacunae aside, the book has many strengths. Katz devotes considerable attention to key products such as the pocket calculator, the breakthrough item for consumer goods. He then moves on to the personal computer, Atari as the forerunner of video games, Apple (for obvious reasons), the development of robots, and much else. By the end of the book, with the rise of software engineering, the "products" in question are often websites, apps, and other less material items. Interestingly, Katz also devotes attention to the increasing use of social science in product development. It's a tour de force of inclusion, especially since the book is rather short. Important too is the fact that he moves seamlessly from the Valley as specific geographical entity to "valley" as a synecdoche for the region, given that the entire Bay Area is now home to high-tech enterprise.

It's particularly gratifying to find out that he devotes attention to the role of San Jose State University and California College of the Arts as well as to Stanford in his narrative of the rise of design and the increasingly sophisticated training of designers. At this point, Stanford's importance scarcely needs to be argued. But most histories of the Valley either ignore or slight other institutions of higher learning.

The book is well written, cogently argued, and a pleasure to read. It would be an excellent choice for assignment in a class of graduate students or advanced undergraduates. Moreover, one can envision its use in a broader range of courses than merely the history of technology. It's an excellent account of the Valley's...