I was recently introduced to the work and writing of Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto. One concept that he writes about that I really like is the idea of nest vs. cave.
The way Fujimoto describes a cave is that it’s a naturally occurring and pre-existing condition. It is exists independent of humans. So if and when a human decides to occupy a cave, he or she must assimilate their lives to that which is already there. They have to deal with the ambiguity of the spaces because it is not clear how everything should be used.
A nest, on the other hand, is something completely created by and for the benefit of a person or animal. It would not exist without someone creating it and so it is prescriptive and functional in a way that a cave is not.
Fujimoto is interested in exploring architecture that is analogous to caves. Which is why he designs houses like this one (House NA) in Tokyo:
On Monday, Google broke the internet when it announced that it was reorganizing itself into a holding company structure called Alphabet.
That means that Google, Inc. will now become a subsidiary, along with many other companies, of Alphabet Inc. and all shares of Google will automatically convert into the same number of shares in Alphabet.
This is huge, but also something that was likely inevitable given the passions of the founders. Apparently Larry Page has been thinking about this move for years.
As it stands pre-Alphabet, Google (with its main internet products) is basically a cash cow funding all of Google’s other experiments. But this muddied the waters and made it difficult for investors to clearly see how much the main internet products were making and how much the founders were spending on self-driving cars, delivery drones (Project Wing), and other new ideas.
Now everything will be separate.
But what’s really exciting about the reorganization is that it sets the stage for Alphabet/Google – which is arguably already one of the most important companies in the world – to become even more impactful in a wide variety of industries and disciplines, some/many not traditionally associated with tech. Each wholly owned subsidiary will have their own CEO and the founders rightly believe, I think, that this overall structure will afford them more “management scale.”
Earlier this week I wrote a post talking about how maybe developers need to position their homes as more of a “product”. After that post, somebody asked me about my thoughts on home automation and how I thought technology was going to creep into the home.
Then today, I came across this networked washing machine prototype from the folks over at Berg. If you can’t see the video below, click here.
Just like Nest, this is the start of taking really unsexy home devices—thermostats, smoke alarms and washing machines—and making them sexy and networked. The "internet of things" is a trend that I think we’ll definitely see a lot more of.
Because more broadly speaking, our homes today are actually really dumb machines. Swiss-born French architect