You may know Airbnb as the website you visit whenever you forget to book a hotel and need a place to crash during your vacation. What you probably didn’t know is the company has an experimental in-house design studio called Samara that works on projects far beyond home sharing and the ethics of using someone else’s bathroom.
Spearheaded by Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia and consisting of industrial designers, interaction designers, architects, roboticists, mechanical and hardware engineers, material specialists, policy experts and a screenwriter for storyboarding new experiences, the studio aims to expand Airbnb’s range of products including architecture services and urban planning.
One of Samsara’s projects, Backyard, investigates how buildings could utilize sophisticated manufacturing techniques, smart-home technologies, and vast insight from the community to better understand the influence of space on owners and occupant relationships.
“Airbnb challenged conventional thinking and pioneered an entirely new industry,” explains Gebbia in a company release. “We helped people activate underutilized space—from a spare bedroom or treehouse to your apartment while you’re away—and built a community that connected people around the world. With Backyard, we’re using the same lens through which Airbnb was envisioned—the potential of space—and applying it more broadly to architecture and construction.”
Using the data they gathered from their Airbnb business such as people’s travel preferences, Samara plans on using Backyard to create homes which aren’t just add-ons to existing houses like Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs), but rather fully furnished homes catered towards the people living inside them.
By asking what a home built for sharing really looks like, a hundred more issues presented themselves. How can one tiny house fit more than a single family? How does it deal with the waste they produce? Can it feel homey without being too crowded? These are just a few questions the team at Samara had to answer.
The team is expected to present their first prototypes in Fall of 2019 — and rest assured, they’ll all likely be Airbnb-inhabitable in case your curiousity leads you to stay in a space designed from the ground-up by world-class designers and engineers.
“I love the team we’re building,” Gebbia adds. “We’ve spent a long time looking for exceptional people who seek out new kinds of challenges, are creative, and are deeply curious about the way the world is put together. ”
With the ever-increasing need for more homes to cope with the world’s increasing population, proper housing is fast becoming an issue which needs to be solved. Not only this, but Airbnb’s nature as a digital liaison doesn’t make it the most stable of businesses. Backyard’s physical houses will hopefully help give the company a more permanent platform to work with.
The team is expected to present their first prototypes in Fall of 2019 — and rest assured, they’ll all likely be Airbnb-inhabitable.
“I love the team we’re building,” Gebbia adds. “We’ve spent a long time looking for exceptional people who seek out new kinds of challenges, are creative, and are deeply curious about the way the world is put together. ”
