Airbnb's offshoot design studio Samara has hired Apple industrial designer Miklu Silvanto to join the company's housebuilding initiative.
Silvanto will move from Apple's industrial design department to lead the industrial and interaction design team at Backyard ? an enterprise that Samara launched last year to devise new ways to design, build and share homes better suited to contemporary lifestyles.
Silvanto, 38, said that he felt "privileged" with the opportunity to work on the project, which plans to roll out housing designs later this year.
"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," he said. "The nature of the work and the creative approach we're taking make me optimistic for the future." Silvanto employed at Apple for eight years
Born in Helsinki, Finland, Silvanto studied Industrial Design at the city's Lahti Institute of Design, and then gained a masters in Design Products at the London's Royal College of Art in 2008.
He began working at Apple under the tech company's chief design officer Jonathan Ive in 2011. He is also the co-founder of Nordic design agency Avian.
Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia hired Silvanto to join the Backyard's eclectic team of architects, urban planners, filmmakers, roboticists, mechanical and hardware engineers, energy specialists and policy experts.

Researching for the housing involves exp...