US: Airbnb has appointed Apple industrial design group member Miklu Silvanto to lead its Samara design studio project.
Dezeen is reporting that Silvanto will now head up the industrial and interaction design team at Backyard, an initiative that was launched in 2018 to explore innovative ways to design, build and share the homes of the future. Backyard is an offshoot of Airbnb’s in-house design studio, Samara.
According to the Backyard website, the project aims to “prototype new ways that homes can be built and shared, guided by an ambition to realise more humanistic, future-oriented and waste-conscious design”.
Samara says that the team is made up of industrial and interaction designers, architects, roboticists, mechanical and hardware engineers, material specialists and policy experts.
Silvanto told Dezeen: “Samara has a huge ambition that will be very difficult to carry out, but it’s exactly the kind of big, crazy gamble that these kinds of companies should be taking.ย The nature of the work and the creative approach we’re taking make me optimistic for the future.”
Silvanto’s experience before joining the rental firm includes graduating from the Royal College of Art, co-founding design agency Aivan in 2007 and working in Apple’s industrial design group under CDO Jony Ive from 2011 to just last month.
He has also worked on and been credited with various Apple design patents spanning AirPods, Apple Watch, iPhone and a number of key accessories.
