Will Apple design homes?
A well-known residential architect we mentioned the idea to says, “of course, they could. But, if they did, they would be cookie-cutter, odd-shaped places that couldn’t sustain character.” That could be.
It’s a fascinating challenge to think about. How would Apple approach new-home design? Isn’t a home nothing more than a consumer’s biggest-ticket user experience? What would that mean to you if Apple began to design homes, neighborhoods, communities?
It’s not an absurd idea. Who’d-a-knowed they’d rock the world of watch and wearable design as they did this Spring? Word now is, they’re working on an electric car. Part of Apple’s DNA is aggressively to explore the expansive nature of its–no pun intended–core.
And why not? The roots of Apple go back to an essential drive: to invent elegant solutions to problems that–at first–sneak around people’s peripheral awareness, and, later emerge as the very definition of necessity.
A genius of Steve Jobs and Jony Ive, Jobs’ No. 1 partner in the repeated perpetration of this product development cycle over three decades, have patented an approach to going deep into understanding human need before it becomes fully conscious of its own raw magnitude and scale.
Perhaps, they’ve discovered that “newness” itself is a basic need, an essential property of what humans–in their primal behavior as consumers–require.
On the surface, Jobs, Ive, and the Apple invention team iterate a process that self-defines and sustains. New Yorker contributor Ian Parker writes this in a deep-dive probe into what makes Ive, the primary architect of Apple invention, including the new watch, tick:
