“Anyone want to see what I unearthed when I cleaned out my garage and found photos of everything I’ve ever made?” Tony Fadell tweeted in mid-April. It was a rhetorical question. Anyone with a passing interest in the last two decades of consumer hardware would jump at the opportunity to see what the man behind the iPod, iPhone and Nest Thermostat had stashed away in those giant Home Depot boxes.
The literal garage cleaning preceded the metaphorical variety, with this week’s publication of “Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making.” The book charts Fadell’s path to some of consumer electronics’ most iconic hardware designs. It’s concerned with, above all, the “why” of product design. It’s a word he uses 50+ times over the course of our 30-minute conversation.
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