Ive noted that he’d been watching “Moon Machines,” an old Discovery Channel series about the Apollo program. “There was the realization we needed to develop a spacesuit, but it was hard to even know what the goals should be,” he said. And then he linked the studio’s work to NASA’s: like the Apollo program, the creation of Apple products required “invention after invention after invention that you would never be conscious of, but that was necessary to do something that was new.” It was a tic that I came to recognize: self-promotion driven by fear that one’s self-effacement might be taken too literally. Even as Apple objects strive for effortlessness, there’s clearly a hope that the effort required—the “huge degree of care,” the years of investigations into new materials, the months spent enforcing cutting paths in Asian factories—will be acknowledged.
What anybody at any level in home building can identify with is that the job of invention, like any other job, may appear to be a single challenge, but it’s actually a mask for several other jobs. How often is a task a single equation of effort and outcome? Almost never, especially in construction and the profitable business management of development and construction. This passage is striking expression that invention–or innovation–too, is not a single equation of effort and outcome. Each innovation is a mask for a multi-layered, multi-dimensional, obsessive pursuit of what needs to be invented in order to understand what needs to be invented next.
This is where we are with housing, particularly the kind of housing people talk about but don’t or can’t do: affordable, beautiful, purposeful, sustaining housing.
Word comes out, here from the Urban Institute, that homeownership rates will decline steadily as the United States population grows over the next 15 years. A new analysis states:
The reason is simple: in the millions of new households forming over the next 15 years, new renters will outnumber new homeowners—causing a sustained surge of rental housing demand that will significantly affect millennials, seniors, and minorities, and expose important gaps in our current housing policies.
Especially, now, when what housing could use, from the standpoint of the economic gain that can be achieved by tilting the playing field ever-so-slightly toward “attainability” of homeownership, we’d love to see what Apple would do as it applies its signature process of invention, and, very plausibly, explores the expansion of its core into home building.
Time will tell.
