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Why everything looks the same
- deafpolygon 4y agoThis applies to operating systems (Mac and Windows look more and more alike by the day) and I'm seeing linux distros follow suit.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- i_am_proteus 4y agoI wonder how many of the big corps are hiring the same management consultants to work on their rebrands.
- ozim 4y agoIf you are Balenciaga what does it bring to have fancy font? It only might make it less readable, makes hassle for production/printing on different types of things. People want to see brand name and you have already established brand - why would you make it harder to for people to see who you are. I can understand if you are a startup that wants to catch an eye - but established companies not really.
- bombcar 4y agoThe customers of rebranding efforts of established companies are not the company's customers, it's the execs/board of the company.
- bayesian_horse 4y agoBecause bootstrap.
- Brajeshwar 4y agoThese days, because of Tailwind and TailwindUI's influence (I love both and bought it during beta). 1. https://tailwindcss.com https://tailwindcss.com 2. https://tailwindui.com https://tailwindui.com
- hknmtt 4y agooh boy, worst offender is material design. it looked horrible when it came out and still looks horrible years after. and so many examples of it out in the wild :(
- machinawhite 4y agoOh god they made this whole design system and thousands of icons and it's all just so ugly, like, did noone actually look at it during the process?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- hsn915 4y agoIn almost every company I joined, the common approach to design anything is to look at what everyone else is doing and copy it. "Google does it this way, so we should too". "Facebook has spent millions on research and decided to do it this way, we should copy them". If you do anything different, you are immediately questioned: "Why are you doing it like this? No one else does it this way". The tech industry is basically controlled by non-tech and non-design people who have no unique sense or taste in anything to speak of. Even self-branded "UX Designers".
- phtrivier 4y agoPlaying devil's advocate here : it is sometimes desirable to reuse a design that your end user's are going to be familiar with. So there's a tension between "being boring and usefully" and "being original at the cost of forcing your users to adapt". Case in point : I had to explain a feature yesterday to a user, and it's complex and not trivial, and what basically saved my day was saying : "it works like in X".
- langsoul-com 4y agoAlso acts as a self reinforcing thing. Like games, wasd is movement, so every other game copied that. If you try to change, people are going to be mighty confused why the controls aren't "normal".
- thaumasiotes 4y agoWASD movement is an innovation. Movement was on the arrow keys before that. A wave of games that wanted you to play with the mouse and keyboard simultaneously made using the arrow keys impossible, unless you wanted to use the mouse with your left hand. If the auxiliary part of the keyboard had been to the left of the main part instead of the right, movement would most likely never have come off the arrow keys.
- YurgenJurgensen 4y agoPC shmups, mostly of PC-98 and MSX traditions, never stopped using arrow keys. New ones released this year still use arrow keys for movement and Shift+ZXC for action buttons. Probably because the mouse was never relevant for that genre.
- j-bos 4y agoThere's a twitter personality calles Lindyman who often covers the same topic from an extended angle, calls it refinement culture. The argument goes that it's not simply aesthetics, stratrgies across domains are all converging into sameness, easiest example being sports. Easiest specific example being baketball becoming a boring game of 3 pointer getting.
- jraby3 4y agoI read recently on the Atlantic newsletter that in sports that’s more the Moneyball statistics of playing. Sports have become overoptimized. 3 pointers in basketball. Strikeouts or home runs in baseball. Maybe it’s too much a focus on math and statistics instead of design in other spaces too? Is that what you mean?
- j-bos 4y agoLargely agreed! My view is that 'everything' is being optimized for utility, consistency, and risk managment. This results in unobjectionable but indistinguishable aesthetics, effective but repetitive sports, and shiny but soulless blockbusters.
- user5678 4y agoBasketball was equally repetitive and homogenous when it was about fighting for position under the rim.
- CadmiumYellow 4y agoI agree with you, but I wonder if there will be a point where this no longer works because things become so consistent and repetitive that they no longer hold people's attention? Will we maybe start getting some variety again? Or will they simply land on the optimal amount of change required to keep people hooked and follow that formula ad nauseam...
- lotsofpulp 4y agoHow do you define too much of a focus in math? Presumably, winning sells more of whatever the sports owners are selling. As long as the buyers are willing to pay more for winning than other aspects of the sport, then that is what the sports owners will optimize for.
- hoseja 4y ago>Venture-backed founders are disproportionately similar demographically: Race Gender Education Socioeconomic background Geography ??? Also that "Liquid Death" is a really dumb example. It's a beverage. Why are you trying to differentiate beverage by design elements.
- mahoho 4y agoLiquid Death strikes me as just an example of the "Gen Z blanding" described by that table in the article (ironic, maximalist, etc.). And that was basically the impression I got the first time I saw it in a store: just another dialectical evolution of cheap, cynical irony that I didn't find surprising at all at the time and I wouldn't be surprised if we see imitators in all kinds of brands in the near future.
- hoseja 4y agoYep, precisely.
- poszlem 4y agoThey forgot to mention: "Politically" https://twitter.com/monitoringbias/status/1589976029187244033 https://twitter.com/monitoringbias/status/158997602918724403...
- h4n1 4y agoRegurgitating old critiques of terrible, homogeneous design, then holding up as counterexamples two of the most embarrassingly bad designs of the last few years. I suppose this is appropriate for a marketer to write, since Tesla and "Liquid Death" are just marketing departments with other afterthoughts attached.
- Garlef 4y agoI don't find this surprising at all and blaming this on big platforms like AirBnN seems to fall a bit short. It's simple: The more global communication gets, the more global the styles and patterns become. Avocado and salmon on sourdough is just good breakfast, no matter where you woke up. And plain concrete rooms have a good aesthetic quality everywhere. Not sure if needs to be advertised on blackboards, written in chalk, though.
- spc476 4y agoConcrete rooms have such an aesthic quality that all U.S. prisons have adapted the look.
- solardev 4y agoModern aesthetics, seismic safety, termite proof... and good for tunneling out of if you put a poster in front of it. Sounds like a win win to me.
- coldtea 4y ago>Avocado and salmon on sourdough is just good breakfast, no matter where you woke up It's only a "good breakfast" for those that have internalized a mostly western-centric aspirational idea of breakfast. Most people in these parts, or say, in Asia or Africa or Latin America, you know where 80% of the global population lives, don't want to have said "good breakfast" 99% of time if they have the choice. We have our own foodstuffs and breakfast preferences... >plain concrete rooms have a good aesthetic quality everywhere Yes, which is why the Eastern Bloc looked so nice
- jemmyw 4y agoThink of a time in the past. Say the 70s. Did everything look the same? Maybe not as converged as now, but still, if you walked into a 70s bathroom you'd be like "This is a 70s bathroom". You could probably look at most cars from the 70s and say it was a 70s style design. Trends follow fashion and capability and regulation. Cars all look the same now because they need to achieve a certain industry wide mpg set by regulation, therefore they follow the same aerodynamic constraints, leaving the makers with the same limited room to make a difference. Room design follows fashion. You can have whatever you like, but when you want to sell a place you need to appeal to the mass market and so you go with the current up-to-date look. And things like AirBnBs all having succulent plants and Nespresso machines - people like plants and succulents are the easiest to care for, people like coffee and Nespresso is cheap and easy to provide. Many things are just waiting for some technical capability. Like folding phones - we'll get a flurry of interesting designs, but if they work out then eventually they'll all converge on the design that works.
- city17 4y agoYou're right, this process has always happened. But I think these days it's different in that it is almost completely globalized, whereas before you would have different trends in different countries, and trends are able to spread more quickly, resulting in less experimentation/differentation by those who aren't aware of the trend yet.
- robotnikman 4y agoI definitely believe wide availability of the internet helped with that. Nowadays you can easily look up what a home in any country looks like and get a bunch of images.
- coldtea 4y ago>Think of a time in the past. Say the 70s. Did everything look the same? No. At worst it just had a few shared aesthetics (which we associate with the 70s look). But far more divergence. And even the aesthetics were way more open ended (e.g. the color palette was huge, now it's white, gray, 4-5 pastels and generall very similar-looking hues that dominate most industries). Look at the brand logos for fashion brands in the TFA, for an example of logos looking unique in the past and then changed to totally homogeneous.
- kstenerud 4y agoCars mostly look the same now because they're in the final stages of commoditization, the same as with phones. They converge as their designs reach "peak appeal" of 80% for maximum profits. Then the niche producers carve out from the remaining 20%. Airbnb apartments are tending towards the "hotel room" look because that's what most of them essentially are. However, every Airbnb I've been in over the past few years has not looked anything like that, so I suspect some bias from places the author goes. Interior spaces most definitely don't look the same. I think this is just the author extrapolating from their Airbnb experiences. The middle class homes will definitely look similar because they all use the same source material (same as they always have - just websites now instead of interior decorator magazines). Consumer brands are all over the map, just like they've always been. And it's not like we haven't had bland brands like General Mills and Polo and Sears for ages. Apps and websites follow the trends because that's what you do in the media space. Nothing new there.
- mikro2nd 4y agoWhy do so many cars look so angry? Big front grilles that look like a growling, howling maw full of teeth, bulging, muscular body shaping... It's like car designers all got together and decided that aggressive-ugly is a good look. I wonder how much that contributes to road-rage?
- ako 4y agoIt's not the car designers, it's the consumers that voted with their wallets by mostly buying angry cars. Apparently car drivers feel a need to intimidate the road users around them...
- DangitBobby 4y agoOr they think it looks cool.
- mikro2nd 4y agoBullshit. If the designers didn't go there first the consumers would have had nothing to vote on.
- sktrdie 4y agoWhen working on UI apps we have teams dedicated to making sure every single decision is driven by data. Every little single thing is A/B tested. All of the designers, UX experts, developers opinion is always secondary compared to just good old "increase of clicks". But then we're just building supermarkets and it makes me angry, well because, supermarkets are ugly. I'd argue that the "most sellable experience" is almost never the "most beautiful experience". In fact most of my memorable experiences are ones that are NOT mass-marketed. This is also the reason why the "blockbuster hollywood movies" are always worst compared to a more unique indie experience. This is also why I think the "AI-diffusion" future where new experiences are created off of old massively marketed ones is doomed to fail. People want diverse unique experiences that have been thought out by experts with decades of experience and with a craftship-level mindset; not things that have been copy/pasted from an AI neural network.
- solardev 4y agoI've never met someone who wanted a diverse, unique app experience. For the most part those are just a pain in the ass created by some overzealous junior designer eager to show off. Bland and predictable apps are so much nicer. It's not an art project, just a barrier to getting something done... please don't go crazy with it...
- bombcar 4y agoShades of every single application in the early 2000s avoiding the Windows design guidelines and building their own weird mishmash of buttons.
- dmitriid 4y agoIt worse with cities and countries. Every city converges into the same bland concrete-metal-glass devoid of any detail that you can't tell the apart.
- lotsofpulp 4y agoI would expect that discoveries in physics and materials science result in a few optimal techniques, especially cost wise. Just like when making an electronic device, it behooves the maker to use silicon 99% of the time.
- seydor 4y agoGlobalization started long ago. With English being spoken everywhere, everything became american. People in obscure countries now celebrate halloween. Well, there are no obscure countries anymore. Once upon a time tourism used to adapt itself to the local culture, now tourists expect the locals to adapt to whatever is considered progressively american. That was the whole point of globalization and what people want. The same soup everywhere. It's not even very new, the tourism industry has been selling since forever packages of "Sea & Sun" with little regard for destination
- Loughla 4y agoMy favorite take on this is actually from Hyperion, and the discussion(s) about what happens to the various planets once the Hegemony releases its citizens onto them via the WorldWeb. I read that as a teen, and it was the first time that my eyes opened up to the absolute homogenization places undergo when they try to appeal to "tourists" (or, as is talked about in the book, when they are forced to appeal to tourists just because of the massive, overwhelming numbers of them).
- rvieira 4y agoIs this simply a carcinisation[0] of design? Sure it all looks the same, but if it works... design is no longer a differentiator, perhaps. [0]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation
- ozim 4y agoThere is widespread realization that people don't care about YOUR website YOUR company or how smart YOU are - you might want to stand out and be cool - but people want to do THEIR business be done with it and go on with their lives. If I go to supermarket I don't want "shopping experience" - I want to buy bread and eggs - set your shop in a way where I can do it quickly and I will be coming back. There are of course places/events where it should be an experience, like if I go to fancy restaurant I want "fancy dinner experience". When I am on the road and have to just eat something McDonalds does the job 10 mins and I am out even if it is not best choice food wise. So setting up your page if it is webshop or streaming service - I don't go there to wonder how cool web design might be - I go there to buy stuff or start video.
- coldtea 4y agoOne would think that "people want to do THEIR business be done with it and go on with their lives", but actually people fall for branding and "aspirational" themes more often than not. Especially the people with the money.
- marban 4y agoAnd that's how the race to the bottom starts for your brand.
- LaundroMat 4y agoI don't understand your comment. There's a lot of value in a brand that promises you'll get what you came for, efficiently (and of course, delivers on that promise).
- zhte415 4y agoYour piece of everything a potato. So, what sort of potato is it? This [1] photo of a potato, sold for a million dollars, gave rise to this quote. > “Kevin likes potatoes because they, like people are all different yet immediately identifiable as being essentially of the same species,” [1] https://petapixel.com/2016/01/21/this-photo-of-a-potato-sold-for-over-1000000/ https://petapixel.com/2016/01/21/this-photo-of-a-potato-sold...
- GuB-42 4y agoI think a lot of it is the result of Hotelling's law. It is a principle rooted in game theory that explains why similar businesses clump together (ex: the McDonald's next to the Burger King). It it exemplified by the ice cream stand problem: two competing ice cream stands on a beach front, similar in every way so that proximity is the only criteria for customers to choose which stand they will go to. Both stands will chose to go towards the center in order to maximize their area of influence. In the end, both stands will be at the center, even though it is not the best for customers, because neither have an incentive to leave the center.
- Maken 4y agoAm I the only one bewildered by the fact the author mentions AirBnb as the start of the modern cloned, esterile, all-white interior design and not IKEA?
- ElfinTrousers 4y agoIKEA is the seed, AirBnb is the soil.
- amelius 4y agoBut why does everything look like it was made for children? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22490089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22490089
- arexxbifs 4y agoI'm surprised the article doesn't mention archtitecture, which seems to be at peak levels of "blanding", at least in Europe. New urban developments effectively erase local idiosyncrasies to the point that they're indistinguishable from one another regardless of whether you're in Germany, Britain, Denmark or Spain. Buildings are permanent in ways apps and restaurant interiors aren't, and I think we're losing something we may not miss until it's gone.
- bombcar 4y agoPart of it is buildings are optimized for construction costs and time, which lead to similar buildings (and once the crews know how to build that type of building, it's easier for them to build more). The main reason left for major country differences (EU vs US) comes down to building materials, mostly. Much of the US is still "stick-built" but lots of EU buildings are brick/concrete.
- bluGill 4y agoThere are also requirements to function. You will have a door to the street. If it is a store you will have large windows up front to display attract passerby. A house in a car dependent area will dedicate most of the front space to a garage. You don't have to do any of the above. However it only takes a little thought to realize that you demand the above.
- bombcar 4y agoAnd there are requirements to sell, too, for many people. Commercial buildings have a bit more lee-way (Walmart hardly ever "moves in" to a building and instead knocks it down and rebuilds), but even people who are custom-building a house to their liking have the "what if I have to resell this" in the back of their mind. I think the biggest sad example of this is how uniform counter heights are in the US, even on multi-million dollar completely custom homes. It's not expensive or hard at all to adjust to fit the user, but it's still sooooo rare.
- 4y ago
- rocket_surgeron 4y agoCars have almost always looked the same. 1939 World's Fair parking lot: https://www.1939nyworldsfair.com/worlds_fair/wf_tour/zone-7/Parking_Lot.htm https://www.1939nyworldsfair.com/worlds_fair/wf_tour/zone-7/... 1959 Boeing employee parking lot: http://forums.pelicanparts.com/pacific-northwest-us-wa-id-ut-hi-ak/802928-1959-boeing-parking-lot-shot.html http://forums.pelicanparts.com/pacific-northwest-us-wa-id-ut... 1979 Omaha parking lot: https://www.reddit.com/r/classiccars/comments/5dk8iy/omaha_parking_lot_1979/ https://www.reddit.com/r/classiccars/comments/5dk8iy/omaha_p... The 90s was actually a brief period where cars did look a little different because you had the prime of the minivan explosion and the beginning of the transition to SUVs along with regular passenger cars. Then in the 2000s SUVs and desperate hunts for aerodynamic (and thus fuel efficiency) performance took over. Here are some silhouettes of pony cars from the 60s and 2000s: https://silhouettehistory.com/post/146062752267/pony-retro-silhouettehistory-silhouettes-of https://silhouettehistory.com/post/146062752267/pony-retro-s... They're the same, unless you are a hardcore car nut and can tell models apart from the rake of the B-pillar. Actually I would argue that the three modern pony cars look more different from each other than the ones in the 60s and 70s did. Of course there were exceptions, with classic sports, luxury, and utility vehicles standing out from their "normal, consumer" peers, but the same is true of today. Nobody is going to mistake a Lotus Evora for a Toyota Camry. But the 1968 Ford Fairlane and Chevy Impala were extremely similar-looking: boxy shape, long chrome stripe running down side, louvered vent below windshield, chrome trim around windshield, four sealed beam headlights, big chrome bumpers, similar windshield angles, wheelbase only 3 inches in difference. The same is true of the other car segments: one compact car looked like another, pickups looked the same, station wagons looked the same. I think what might be happening is that, yes, all automobiles of the current generation and type look similar-- but so did all cars of the past generations and when making comparisons they're remarking on how different generational "cohorts" look different and mistakenly thinking that meant vehicles within the cohort looked different.
- sam_goody 4y agoHow in the world did you find those images?
- 4y ago
- forgotpwd16 4y agoVery good article. The hyperlinks within are worth checking. Wonder when the "blanding" term first appeared and when it started becoming apparent. Related, the logo part is also covered providing other possible reasons in https://velvetshark.com/articles/why-do-brands-change-their-logos-and-look-like-everyone-else https://velvetshark.com/articles/why-do-brands-change-their-... (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32040506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32040506).
- jjarvis 4y agoThis aesthetic will pass one day. I think that the current minimal aesthetic really started in the early 00's with Apple's iPod. That design was striking at the time and was the antithesis to 90's grunge aesthetic. I was also a big fan of minimal techno back then and I almost felt like Apple was making nods to that lifestyle. We were certainly using their computers to produce it! Now minimalism is old hat. I suspect that Gen Z will make some minor statements against it. But the big disruption won't come for another generation. I recently read Generations by Neil Howe and William Strauss. In the book they make the case that their are 4 archetypes to a generation cycle - Idealist (boomer), Reactive (gen x), Civic (millennial) and Adaptive (gen z). Idealists and Civics are the dominant generations. While Reactive and Adaptive are the less so (one reacts against and the other codifies). We will soon repeat the cycle sometime in the 2030's. The generation following gen z will be an idealist generation and will disrupt the current "blanding" trends we are living with. Think about the last time this happened. In the 1950s the silent generation (the last cycle's adaptive generation) was coming of age in an extremely conformist era created by the GI Generation (civics). Then the boomers came to age and the 1960s happened.
- anthk 4y ago> think that the current minimal aesthetic really started in the early 00's with Apple's iPod. That design was striking at the time and was the antithesis to 90's grunge aesthetic. Unix users had flat designs on Fluxbox/Blackbox and lot of themes. http://tenr.de/styles/ http://tenr.de/styles/ On the rest of the platforms, I remind you System6 and 7 on Apple were minimal and flat.
- 1123581321 4y agoInteresting theory. I’ve read speculation that we may get an austere, conservative (perhaps pious) generation this century, based on cases of declining empire like Rome and Sweden. There are counter-examples as well.
- kelseyfrog 4y agoIt depends on what is specifically meant by current minimal aesthetic. At least in architecture, minimalist modernism we can clearly point to Aldof Loo's Ornement and Crime(1908)[1]. It includes gems such as > The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornamentation from utilitarian objects. > Ornament does not heighten my joy in life or the joy in life of any cultivated person. and > Freedom from ornament is a sign of spiritual strength. There was not a history of minimal aesthetic before this era. I'm not sure how this fits into any generational cycle. I'm not too keen on generational reductionism. 1. https://idoc.pub/documents/adolf-loos-ornament-and-crimepdf-d49oqp69e049 https://idoc.pub/documents/adolf-loos-ornament-and-crimepdf-...
- ookblah 4y agothis is just the natural evolution of the web/current products i feel like... nobody complains that a cup has a handle and is shaped a certain way. there was a huge push to be "unique" or come up with some clever ui/ux maybe a decade or 2 ago. everything that can be tried has been (medium style editors, page builders, carts, shopping sites, corporate sites, etc. list goes on) and is in the end stages of being "refined" now. i think that time is near over now. people just want their information or to use their app and be done with it. i'm fine w/ all my apps having similar layout and design if it helps me get shit done. maybe a new paradigm or industry will open that creativity once again.
- bentobean 4y agoMinor quibble - fast internet is popular because it is fast (not because of affluent, self-selecting sensibilities).
- _xnmw 4y agoIn America. This is why I love Europe, especially the places which preserve and continue to develop the tradition of beauty, variety, attention to detail, and individual “soul” of each and every place. In Ukraine, for example, every Puzhata Khata location (a cheap Ukrainian homestyle diner chain where I am sitting and eating as I write this comment) looks completely different with its own unique character and furnishings.
- titzer 4y agoThe AirBnB'ing of interior decorating has spilled over into the general housing market, driven too, by too many HGTV shows. It's gotten to the point where if I see a gray floor or countertop, it just screams that this place has no character or charm, that the owners or flippers have no imagination and that I am not the target audience. Shame, because a lot of places have a nice character that just needs to be fixed up. But fixing up takes a custom solution; time, rather than money. Just so much easier to rip out the old and overprint with the factory crap that's in vogue. Not that other time periods didn't have their fads and fashions, of course. But those fads and fashions are now kind of charming, where they've survived. Will the 2010s and 2020s interior decor induce nostalgia 50 years from now? Who knows.
- tomatotomato37 4y agoI'd say even adding money won't decrease the homogenization of modern day building design; instead it usually just results in a higher quantity of the same, ala the McMansion. There is even an entire blog about how these supposedly unique houses really are the same underneath (https://mcmansionhell.com/ https://mcmansionhell.com/)
- jollyllama 4y ago> Risk mitigation — There’s safety in pursuing ideas already validated by the market. This is the underlooked factor. It's why movie posters all looked the same for a while, a guy standing in front of a large expanse, often with his back facing you. When faced with ambiguity, it's just easier to copy everyone else rather than take a risk.
- ehnto 4y ago> These prefabricated brand signifiers combined to give us what we now know as the “millennial aesthetic,” a blueprint designed to entice Instagram-obsessed young people. I would love to point out that Zoomers are out here voting, and some of them are in their 20s. Millennials are not young people anymore. > A 2021 Road & Track article titled “Why does every new car look like every other new car?” compares the form factors of midsize SUVs from 24 manufacturers. Despite a wide range of price points, they’re more alike than they are different: This has been true for decades, and unlike the other points I think this can be fairly characterized by industry required risk avoidance. Bringing a car to market is wildly expensive, having one flop because of an edgy design would be, and has been, very consequential. I think as we move into our electric car future we might see more radical designs and more bespoke manufacturers as drivetrain stops being such a big cost and differentiator. > Website design, especially for SaaS companies, is depressingly mundane I like to take a stroll through the Japanese web from time to time, it's an alternate universe that looks nothing like the western web.
- r2_pilot 4y agoThis optimization of everything eventually leading to everything looking the same is one reason why I hope we don't meet extraterrestrial aliens, although statistically they likely exist, because they probably have similar problems they solve with similar technology, and if there's no special magic, I think many things they'd make would be similar to ours, which is mildly disheartening if you like science fiction as much as I do.
- chaostheory 4y agoWell, it shouldn’t matter to Star Trek fans then. Bad jokes aside, unless I missed it, the author forgot one major reason for everything being similar: cost and globalization ie everything is designed and made by respectively the same people and countries. If blandness is the price for people in developing countries being able to afford what we have, it’s a price I’m willing to pay.
- mecsred 4y agoI think there's good reason to be optimistic about diversity at that scale. The environment shapes the direction your easiest path takes. Available material as well as the policies of an alien culture may be enough to send the local minima for optimizations way sideways. Who can say how it plays out on a multi-planet civilization scale, but I think we'd have enough reasons to be happy if we got there :)
- achenet 4y agodon't confuse the "best practices" of late stage capitalism with what life is capable of. The biosphere is, and has been for several hundred million years, incredibly diverse. CF: Amazon rainforest.
- r2_pilot 4y agoYes, but ultimately physics is physics, and it's hard to beat, say, an electric tea kettle for boiling water quickly, regardless of form factor surrounding the heating element.
- swayvil 4y agoI prefer to have all of my consumables delivered via periodic automated Amazon Prime. This, combined with a small maintenance staff, and several tubes, frees me to work almost 24-7. I never leave my Aeron Task Chair.
- ElfinTrousers 4y agoI'm not a fan of blandness, but those counterexamples left me cold. I'm reserving judgement on the Cybertruck until I see how it works out when people are driving it on public roads, but Liquid Death is a product in a sector that barely has reason to exist, differing from its competitors only by its marketing gimmick. Also, how long until some smoothbrain who thinks it's hilarious to drive around drinking Liquid Death gets pulled over by a cop who thought (or were willing to claim they thought) they saw a beer can, and said smoothbrain ends up getting arrested for the other stuff in their car?
- spudzz 4y agoOne of the major reasons for increasing homogeneity is big data. This is why websites, apps, and ads look the same. They have been optimized to capture the attention of your lizard brain. These aesthetics have been carefully analyzed and fine-tuned through A/B experimentation to capture the most eyeballs, produce the most clicks, increase the dollars in your shopping cart.
- temptemptemp111 4y ago
- pannSun 4y ago> A triple threat of economic globalization, generational transition, and new technology has flattened the aesthetics of our digital and physical lives. What are the origins of these regressive trends? Given that things used to be less flat, uniform, and globalized, and now they are more, with no signs of the trend stopping, it would be more accurate to call these trends not regressive, but progressive.
- uoaei 4y agoProgress doesn't just mean "moving toward the future". It is not "progressive" to remove diversity and agency in favor of a strict sociocultural contract. This is rather a perfect example of conservatism: refusing to extend beyond comfort zone boundaries because of a strong sense of risk avoidance, for fear of missing out on market opportunity. This conservatism has always existed but has a much broader reach in the era of the global community, and expresses itself in paradoxically new and exciting ways as it froths through the reactors of specific cultures. I believe "regressive" is used in the sense that the aesthetics are "regressing toward a mean", which is true almost by definition, assuming you believe the postulates in the article.
- pannSun 4y agoIf discarding the old, traditional, inherited logo, and adopting a new one in line with current trends, with the intent to show a commitment to "diversity & inclusion", is "conservative", then the word can really mean whatever you want it to mean, can't it?
- poszlem 4y agoThe ironic thing is that I read about that on a blog hosted on medium.com, a website that is one of the reason all the blogs look the same too.
- onemoresoop 4y agoEven the tourist trinkets look the same, they're all made in China nowadays with some stamped flags and such, luckily I'm not buying much stuff these days.
- hcarvalhoalves 4y agoI call this "the great MBAlization". It's the reason every furniture is beige, every company turns into an advertising company and even creative industries like Hollywood can only make superhero/franchise movies. Risk aversion, margin squeezing and exploiting established consumer bases as much as possible.
- boh 4y agoAesthetics in general have completely stalled. The Brooklyn coffee house look, IKEA minimalism or boring Bauhaus architecture have been the default themes for most products/buildings/websites. A mix of impersonal mass production with a touch of Wes Anderson. I hope we can move past it and have newer visual cues that are not permanently stuck in the early 2000's.
- gumby 4y ago> Playing on the company’s name, he called the phenomenon AirSpace For what it's worth this is a term from architecture, IIRC coined by Pascoe about 25 years ago, using airports as the jumping off point. Unfortunately most of my books are in storage so I can't confirm the name at the moment, but I know the book is at least a quarter century old.
- XCSme 4y agoIKEA