Hiroki Asai: Design Tangents Episode Twenty
A deep dive into creative culture, contextual design and the full arc of a traveler’s journey with Airbnb
For this episode of Design Tangents, we sat down with Hiroki Asai, Airbnb’s Chief Experience Officer—a role he describes with characteristic understatement despite its breadth. The conversation quickly moved beyond interface design and into the larger question of how travel itself is shaped, supported and elevated through thoughtful, contextual creative work.
Asai’s path begins in Cupertino, where as a kid his early aesthetic was shaped by skate culture’s visual language. After studying graphic design in college, he moved to San Francisco with traditional designer ambitions. That trajectory shifted when he joined Apple, where he learned to collapse the boundaries between product, story and clarity of communication.
The empathy required to communicate something can transcend design entirely
Hiroki Asai
At Airbnb, Asai positions his team at the intersection of product and narrative. Sketching travel’s future, he emphasized how Airbnb is shifting from being a “booking app” to “a travel companion.” That means design choices must respect context. Where are you? What time is it? What’s around you? What might you feel like doing next? Whether it’s suggesting local experiences, surfacing non-traditional stays, anticipating check-in using app cues—it’s all rooted in the idea that travel is sensory, temporal and emotional.
Creative work needs structure. You can’t just wait for lightning to strike
Hiroki Asai
Asai is equally clear about creative culture. For him, the most effective creative teams sit in-house, embedded with product and engineering, supported by strong program management that moves ideas from intuition to execution. The result is a design philosophy grounded in context, simplicity and continuity—design isn’t just about how something looks or feels in isolation: it’s about how it flows. How it connects. How it anticipates. And how the human at the other end experiences it—not just at point of interaction but as memory, expectation and delight.
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Design Tangents is produced and edited by SANDOW Design Group. Special thanks to the podcast production team: Rob Schulte, Hannah Viti, and Rachel Senator and to Amber Lin for creating our show art. Discover more design podcasts from SURROUND at surroundpodcasts.com.
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