Good catch re: cost. I bet every medieval peasant's home looked the same, but the homes of the aristocracy were different and varied. Novelty is expensive and/o

Good catch re: cost. I bet every medieval peasant's home looked the same, but the homes of the aristocracy were different and varied. Novelty is expensive and/or time consuming. The same is true in industrial design too. If you use common designs you can often build your product from off the shelf parts, reuse already deployed manufacturing processes, etc. A fully unique and novel design would require retooling, re-testing for things like product safety, etc. What we are seeing is perhaps a post-industrial, clean, technologically advanced peasantry. Of course my observation may be baloney... do all super rich peoples' homes look the same? What does Jeff Bezos' house look like? I've seen pictures of the interiors of super yachts and there's definitely some sameness. Of course there you're dealing with more engineering constraints. "The ocean designs boats." > I suspect a lot of people these days assume that most "alternative" things are unusual for the sake of being unusual, and not actually some stroke of genius. It's also often the recycling of some old trope. Original genius exists but it's pretty rare.