Why Airbnb just bought a unusual Russian Industrial Design firm

Airbnb has got the five-person Russian industrial design firm Lapka. it will seem like a ordinary pairing: the $24 billion room rental platform shopping for a tiny, foreign firm identified for cult-classic objects, like an environmental sensor that fits for your iPhone, or a breathalyzer formed as a stark, black ceramic tube.

It’s less surprising whilst you realize that Lapka is among the most quietly considerate industrial design studios on the planet, and Airbnb wants to personal the tip-to-finish expertise of travel. whilst Lapka’s founder, Vadik Marmeladov, breaks the information to me over the telephone whereas apologizing that he can’t say extra, i will already think about the probabilities: Airbnb-branded good locks to get rid of the weird-key negotiation. subtle take a look at-in sensors to let a number recognize when a guest arrived. truly, any form of dependent, helpful object that Lapka may design for the 1.2 million Airbnb leases global—although an Airbnb spokesperson says there are no plans for Airbnb to enhance devices at the moment.

I met Lapka founder Marmeladov for the first time at our 2013 Innovation with the aid of Design Awards. He was dressed head-to-toe in tailor-made black clothes. His most effective accessories were his perfectly circular glasses, an extended metal neck chain, and scuffless white skater footwear.

It used to be hard not to see his cloth wardrobe as a charmingly cognizant twist on the black mock turtleneck and jeans of Steve Jobs—especially as he confessed to me that in the future, if his company ever bought big, every worker would costume this fashion. “That’s the dream, anyway,” he mentioned with a self-effacing chortle.

i feel he laughed because Lapka, as a studio, was once so obviously more rooted in exploratory design philosophy than pandering makes an attempt at mass market scale. Their debut product was a modular environmental sensor that plugged into your iPhone to scan your food and air quality, together with nearby radiation. Its execution was exquisite—mixing plastics, wood, and woven cords to show this scientific scanner into an obtainable, even fascinating device. The product used to be seemingly born from the passionate naiveté of a design student, however completed with a poise most huge companies would envy. but what was the market?

Lapka’s apply-up used to be a breathalyzer—scratch that, it was the sector’s most lovely breathalyzer. It was how you’d think about Jony Ive would possibly check if he was okay to drive after a night out: a charcoal-black ceramic tube that you just blew into and synced along with your telephone. yet, as Marmeladov defined to me then, its industrial design wasn’t if truth be told intended to be spotted from across the room like an iPhone or pair of white earbuds. In use, your hand naturally wrapped across the tool—hiding the breathalyzer entirely—and in doing so, the product if truth be told changed into your conduct of blowing into your hand.

“We need to be a submit-Apple company. We need to do issues they are able to’t do,” Marmeladov informed me at the time. “they have got to show a product because of the traders and the business. we are able to afford to not exhibit the product. So we were considering we shouldn’t design the rest at this level. We should design the behavior reasonably than the product.”

With that philosophy in thoughts, imagine, again, Airbnb’s community of 1.2 million homes. They’re all linked by minimal digital friction to make the lingering expertise of Airbnb, not their app or a site, but the feeling of traveling considered one of one hundred ninety nations in the course of the eyes of an area. Airbnb isn’t just an rental condo provider. It’s the very act of journey.

So whatever product Lapka is constructing for Airbnb possibly gained’t be concerning the product in any respect. it is going to be, like that aluminum breathalyzer, a gesture. It received’t be a sensible lock, no. it’ll simply be a door that you simply open.