🟧 Airbnb’s relaunch and the texture era of design

High-touch aesthetics show that you care.

The housing rental platform is becoming a high-touch lifestyle app, and crystallizing a new design trend in the process. But can any trend survive AI replication?

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Airbnb’s new, skeuomorphic icons

Kyle Chayka: Airbnb recently rebooted itself. In its annual “summer release” on May 13, the co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky essentially announced a new era for the app. Airbnb is no longer just about home rentals; it’s a place to get “Experiences” and “Services”, anything from a surfing lesson to a haircut or prepared meals. Chesky has been presenting this as a kind of personal, mind-blowing epiphany, as recounted in a slyly mocking Wired profile, complete with glamorous CEO photo shoot. Chesky compared himself to Jack Kerouac, spewing 10,000 words of a manifesto: “I dusted off all my ideas from 2012 to 2016. I basically said, ‘We’re not just a vacation app—we’re going to be a platform, a community.’” Same! Who among us is not a platform, a community?

Experiences have already failed for Airbnb once. It turns out it’s harder to productize and scale human-to-human interaction than renting out empty houses. What’s more interesting than the pivot is the aesthetic. Airbnb has always been a design-forward company, its brand as prominent as its tech. After the relaunch, its icons are softly rounded pictographs, like custom emoji. The icon for the services tab on the homepage is a bellhop bell that animates when you click on it; the Experiences icon is a cute hot-air balloon. There are icons of tiny landscapes, tiny cameras, tiny massage tables.

As Chesky later posted on X, it’s an intentional shift away from generic geometric designs and toward texture and form. With the tiny, detailed scenes and the dynamic animations, your eye has something to grab on to, to figure out. It’s not the frictionless reductionism of the 2010s (think of Uber) or the hyper-minimalism of ChatGPT. “Skeuomorphism” is the design strategy of making digital objects look like what they refer to in physical space. It was unfashionable for a while, but now it’s back.

Carly Ayres wrote an insightful newsletter, ”why everyone is suddenly so thirsty for designers,” about the shift:

Flat design dominated the last decade. Its aesthetic—clean, quiet, systematized—mapped neatly to the metrics-driven culture of post-2010s tech. Skeuomorphism, by contrast, is maximalist, opinionated, and expensive. It implies care. It doesn’t scale easily. Is this return to skeuomorphism a sign of renewed commitment or a nostalgic provocation? Are we celebrating the icons, or what they represent?

That “care” really stuck in my mind. Care is about intention, patience, and impact. It’s the opposite of scalability; scalability is when you don’t care, when you think that the same user experience should be applied to everyone on earth. Airbnb was a vector of that kind of scalability as it popularized the generic international minimalism of AirSpace, a flattening of aesthetic taste. Care, however, is against flattening. Airbnb now has to reinforce a sense of intimacy and specificity because it’s trying to promote (and sell) person-to-person interaction, IRL.

And yet! Any aesthetic innovation is relentlessly adopted and co-opted until it comes to signify its opposite. We’ll see more tech companies follow in Airbnb’s wake; a design entrepreneur on X already demonstrated how he used AI to replicate the skeuomorphic, rounded, animated icons, effortlessly whipping up a coffee machine. Care is also the opposite of automation; it’s a barista making a cappuccino with latte art for you by hand instead of a Nespresso machine pod. But AI makes automation almost irresistible. It’s increasingly difficult to signify quality in any kind of visual or brand choice, because anyone can catch up to you more or less overnight.

Which makes for a quandary: Do you need more design to show that you care, or less to show that it’s real? I’ll be watching for further examples of hyper-textured design, but I’ll also be slightly suspicious of it, looking for something that can’t be faked.

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