5 ms·

I think this article really misses the root cause. Take cellphones, for example. In the early 2000s there was a "Cambrian explosion" of cellphone designs as mak

I think this article really misses the root cause. Take cellphones, for example. In the early 2000s there was a "Cambrian explosion" of cellphone designs as makers tried to figure out what would work best. It's easy to wax nostalgic for all the various flip phones/slide-out phones/"twist" phones, etc., but the fact is the "glass slab" really ended up working best - it has a lot fewer components to wear, and the lack of physical controls means that apps have lots of freedom to make full use of the screen. The glass slab design won out over all the others. If anything, so much design (and not just industrial) seems boring today because everything seems to converge to the "optimal" design much faster. Cars had all these wacky designs in the 50s and 60s because we hadn't yet optimized for things like aerodynamics. When I first saw the "modern farmhouse" housing design in my city, I thought "that looks nice" - now it makes me gag because I see them everywhere, with insane prices to boot. The Internet has caused, in many ways, a reduction of individual markets and "winner take all" economics, and that includes design. Much has already been written about how many logos all look the same now, e.g. https://www.sublimio.com/why-are-all-fashion-logos-becoming-the-same/ https://www.sublimio.com/why-are-all-fashion-logos-becoming-...

jasonhong 1y ago
The general term for what you're describing here is a Dominant Design, and it has a lot of the characteristics of what you intuited. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_design
IgorPartola 1y ago
With cell phones it is also about moving the physical device out of your consciousness so you can better utilize the actual application. And because each app does a different and unknown thing, you can’t design your hardware around your software. However, with cars I think that doesn’t hold. Cars don't need to disappears into the background. Yet every car is converging on an unholy child of a minivan and a small crossover SUV. They are all the same and they are all equally ugly. Sacrificing a bit of aerodynamics for any level of personality would be a welcome shakeup.
- deadbabe 1y ago
  So Cybertruck.
  - Gigachad 1y ago
    You just get burned alive when the computerised door handles stop working and the reinforced windows can't be broken.
    - lostlogin 1y ago
      The product demo showed how to handle the reinforced windows.
  - Our_Benefactors 1y ago
    More like the Mazda cx5, Toyota rav4, and Honda crv. Those things are everywhere and then some.
    - SoftTalker 1y ago
      People like them, and buy them. Not sure why the mystery.
  - IgorPartola 1y ago
    I was talking about car, not Home Depot refrigerator specials from 2010.
- Gigachad 1y ago
  Most people don't really care about cars. It's a tool that gets you places and carries your stuff. Ideally for the lowest cost. People care a lot more about safety ratings, fuel efficiency, and resale value than they to about unconventional design.
  - MichaelZuo 1y ago
    This seems intuitively obvious, new car buyers overwhelmingly put design way down the list of priorities. I think it was the same in the 50s and 60s, just that the then car manufacturers hadn’t figured out how to compete in the other more important aspects as effectively.
Mistletoe 1y ago
I think you are confusing optimal design for the design that makes them the most money by appealing to the maximum amount of people. It’s why all of our cars are now black, white, or silver/gray. Don’t you dare waste a bit of money on red paint someone might not want! So everything around us turns into gray goo that takes no chances at all so it can make the most money. Then it becomes a worse and worse feedback loop.
jrvarela56 1y ago
I think it’s a mix of social media and risk aversion, this article touches on the broader discussion as it impacts many kinds of design https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average
- musebox35 1y ago
  Brilliant, I have always felt that one of the major problems with machine learning, consequently LLMs, is the boring average based loss functions that under-represent the unique and the rare. It seems our collective civilization is using a similar function and heading in the same direction of optimizing for the average.
  - leoedin 1y ago
    The world is rapidly homogenising. You see it with “air space” interior design - coffee shops have the same aesthetic in every major city in the world. You see it in local fashions. You see it as a tourist - travel anywhere in the world and the chances are you’ll find the same kind of shop selling the same kind of trinket. Made in China with a subtly different graphic on it to represent the country you’re in.
    - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
      This has been happening ever since trade routes were established across Eurasia (Silk Road) or the Americas were discovered. It only keeps accelerating as movement and trade becomes easier. If pockets of humanity could isolate themselves from the rest, we could get diversity growing again, that one sentinel island might be our only hope.
WalterBright 1y ago
Cars all look the same now because, due to fuel economy regulations, they are all designed in a wind tunnel to minimize drag. Also, regulations cover all kinds of things, mainly to reduce injury to pedestrians. You cannot even tell if a car is a Ferrari these days, unless you can see the badge.
- scandox 1y ago
  > reduce injury to pedestrians Strange then that everyone around me is driving some kind of high fronted armoured car
  - WalterBright 1y ago
    I think trucks are exempt from a lot of those rules.
  - goodcanadian 1y ago
    I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with reducing injury to pedestrians and everything to do with reducing injury to occupants.
- aloha2436 1y ago
  > You cannot even tell if a car is a Ferrari these days, unless you can see the badge. This seems like excessive hyperbole, I can reliably tell apart every marque on the road in my country by lights and grille shape.
  - WalterBright 1y ago
    So you can't tell from the side?
    - antonvs 1y ago
      The current Ferrari lineup helpfully has a badge on the side. But even without that, something like the SF90 is pretty recognizable from the side: https://www.gtrent.com/upload/images/modelli/ferrari/sf90_spider/ferrari_sf90_spider_dimensioni.png https://www.gtrent.com/upload/images/modelli/ferrari/sf90_sp...
grues-dinner 1y ago
I think also a century of margin squeeze has trimmed off basically all the fat. Get rid of finials, cornices, non-standard windows, and then look for the next victim. It's like in the 60s everyone decided that more modern means more simple and we've only stripped back from then on. Everything from machine tools to appliances and housing has much less decoration now that it used to. Industrial stuff is all very clean and tidy in painted cubes and blocks of flats and houses are very shipshape and AirBnB fashion, but there's no heart in a lot of it. Part of it is manufacturing techniques - when you had hand made features and hand-sculpted cast components, there's an innate organic nature. With modern CAD/CAM and materials handling, sheet, slab and bar is often the order of the day, and even plastic mouldings tend towards utilitarian. High end stuff can still get a nice-looking casting, but it's a premium value-add, whereas previously the whole unit was premium. Oddly, it's never been cheaper in labour to get a plaster decoration made, but you can hardly get them, whereas they were sold in catalogues by the ton when they were carefully hand-moulded. And yes, things are far cheaper in many ways (housing excepted), so it's not all bad news, but it's just very sterile. Which is a shame because I'm fairly sure that nearly everyone except for some die-hard Brutalists and float glass manufacturers actually love pretty buildings and even originally mildly interesting buildings become tourist attractions among the glass slabs and cubes today.
- tpm 1y ago
  > It's like in the 60s everyone decided that more modern means more simple and we've only stripped back from then on. That actually started way sooner than in the 60s. For a good starting point see the 1910 essay Ornament and Crime from Adolf Loos, but even that was a bit after the cultural change already started, though before it was widely applied. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornament_and_Crime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornament_and_Crime
- hilbert42 1y ago
  "Get rid of finials, cornices, non-standard windows, and then look for the next victim." Well, I live in a house built in the Victorian era and I love my cornices and architraves decorated with classical shapes that go back to antiquity—astragals, cavettos and such—and my cedar doors, panelling, window sills, skirting boards again all shaped with classical mouldings—ogees, coves, ovolos, cymae, scotias, beadings, etc mostly together in various architecturally-pleasing combinations. And, yes, my house even has a finial on top. These days, it's unfortunate that many of us never give much consideration to or take time to even look at these decorative shapes let alone examine them carefully. Shame really, as they aren't just fleeting fashion from the bygone Victorian era but are wonderful geometric shapes and curves that have stood the test of time, in fact they've been appreciated for at least several thousand years. "Oddly, it's never been cheaper in labour to get a plaster decoration made, but you can hardly get them, whereas they were sold in catalogues by the ton when they were carefully hand-moulded." I don't consider my house to be exceptional by any stretch but still it's an ongoing testament to both good design and to the excellent skills of craftsmen who built it. That build quality is just not available today despite builders and carpenters having excellent timesaving tools not available in yesteryears. Moreover, those classical geometric curves cut into the woodwork in my house weren't done with modern machinery (say a spindle moulder) but planed by hand with either a wooden hand plane or a combination plane like the Stanley No. 45†, and cutting mouldings this way is difficult and requires considerable skill (I know, I've had to do it when making repairs). Unfortunately, as you've mentioned, modern CAD/CAM and other industrial tech has made manufacturing easier than ever and yet design (and often quality) have almost hit rock bottom. Whether it's building houses or computers and or any numbers of things, design is almost nonexistent; or little or no thought has been given to the ergonomics of how products are used (I'm continually whingeing on HN about the terrible ergonomics of much software produced these days). These aren't isolated cases, recently on separate occasions I've purchased cargo-type work pants (different brands) and the special smartphone pockets in both aren't deep enough to do the zipper up, my normal sized phone protrudes about a cm above the zipper (it's a great feature to prevent phone loss but totally useless if it can't be zipped). How the fuck can something as obvious as that happen? I've come to the conclusion it's a combination of manufacturers maximizing profit and the fact that too few complain, a general drop in aesthetic appreciation across society and our disposable throwaway culture: "who cares if it doesn't look good or it's buggy, we'll be chucking it out in a year or so anyway." _ † I own a Stanley No. 45, if look carefully in these links you'll see numbers of its plane irons have curved cutting surfaces that conform to the geometry of those curves. https://www.carters.com.au/index.cfm/index/9072-woodworking-tools-planes-planes-combination/ https://www.carters.com.au/index.cfm/index/9072-woodworking-... https://www.jimbodetools.com/products/complete-set-of-22-cutters-for-stanley-no-45-combination-plow-plane-in-original-box-89509 https://www.jimbodetools.com/products/complete-set-of-22-cut...
marssaxman 1y ago
> The glass slab design won out over all the others. It is a shame that this is true, because I have never loved any slab-of-glass phone the way I loved my old BlackBerries. I just can't type properly without physical feedback; I'm constantly making and correcting typos, all slow and awkward. The phone no longer feels like a tool ought to feel: an extension of myself into the world - it's just some gadget I'm obligated to carry around and put up with.
- eightysixfour 1y ago
  I had an interesting experience with this - I have a friend who talks about their phone and its keyboard exactly how you do, so I asked to watch them type something out on the keyboard. He painstakingly erases every mistyped letter along the way and demand precision that is impossible given the constraints. When I type on a phone keyboard, it is a tool for communicating, not for typing, and I type word-wise instead of letter-wise and use the autocorrect/correction bar liberally. I'll do maybe one or two more manual edits when I am fully done typing. I tried to get him to try this approach and he just couldn't do it. He needed every letter to be the one he meant to hit. When I need to type something I know autocorrect will screw up, or I am typing a URL or something it won't get right, I slow down dramatically and type like they do. Not quite swiping, but holding my finger longer to see the pop-up. Not sure if it is a worldview thing, a way the brain works thing, or something else, but it has been a long ongoing conversation between me and him about the different ways we use computer and computer adjacent devices - I'm more than happy with search-centric interfaces, he hates them and needs manual organization, etc. This carries over to AI where I perceive it as a partner in completing a task, he sees it as an unreliable and unruly tool that won't follow his precise instructions.
  - marssaxman 1y ago
    My experience sounds much the same, yes. I suppose your friend also touch-types? I find it very difficult to look at my fingers instead of the text while I'm trying to write - it's so distracting! - but of course that makes it tougher to hit the simulated keys I mean to press. I suspect that people who never learned to type properly might have an easier time of it. This likely compounds: when some task will be an order of magnitude easier if I wait to do it on a computer, I'm unlikely to bother attempting it on a phone, so I likely never spend enough time trying to write on a phone to develop fluency with its interface. I never use autocorrect or any sort of typing-assistance features, on the phone or anywhere else. All the flashing and zooming is unbearably distracting, and the machine guesses wrong often enough that it feels like more hindrance than help. I have not yet spent enough time playing with AI tools to have developed much of an opinion about them, but I can easily imagine why your friend might feel that way - I, too, have very little patience for unruly tools! If I have to think about the tool, and manage it, and can't just wield it as an extension of my mind, it usually feels better to just do the work by hand, even if that would take longer.
tonyedgecombe 1y ago
Also coffee shops and air bnbs: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2024/jan/16/the-tyranny-of-the-algorithm-why-every-coffee-shop-looks-the-same https://www.theguardian.com/news/2024/jan/16/the-tyranny-of-...

jasonhong 1y ago

The general term for what you're describing here is a Dominant Design, and it has a lot of the characteristics of what you intuited. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_design

IgorPartola 1y ago

With cell phones it is also about moving the physical device out of your consciousness so you can better utilize the actual application. And because each app does a different and unknown thing, you can’t design your hardware around your software. However, with cars I think that doesn’t hold. Cars don't need to disappears into the background. Yet every car is converging on an unholy child of a minivan and a small crossover SUV. They are all the same and they are all equally ugly. Sacrificing a bit of aerodynamics for any level of personality would be a welcome shakeup.

deadbabe 1y ago
So Cybertruck.
- Gigachad 1y ago
  You just get burned alive when the computerised door handles stop working and the reinforced windows can't be broken.
  - lostlogin 1y ago
    The product demo showed how to handle the reinforced windows.
- Our_Benefactors 1y ago
  More like the Mazda cx5, Toyota rav4, and Honda crv. Those things are everywhere and then some.
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    People like them, and buy them. Not sure why the mystery.
- IgorPartola 1y ago
  I was talking about car, not Home Depot refrigerator specials from 2010.
Gigachad 1y ago
Most people don't really care about cars. It's a tool that gets you places and carries your stuff. Ideally for the lowest cost. People care a lot more about safety ratings, fuel efficiency, and resale value than they to about unconventional design.
- MichaelZuo 1y ago
  This seems intuitively obvious, new car buyers overwhelmingly put design way down the list of priorities. I think it was the same in the 50s and 60s, just that the then car manufacturers hadn’t figured out how to compete in the other more important aspects as effectively.

Mistletoe 1y ago

I think you are confusing optimal design for the design that makes them the most money by appealing to the maximum amount of people. It’s why all of our cars are now black, white, or silver/gray. Don’t you dare waste a bit of money on red paint someone might not want! So everything around us turns into gray goo that takes no chances at all so it can make the most money. Then it becomes a worse and worse feedback loop.

jrvarela56 1y ago

I think it’s a mix of social media and risk aversion, this article touches on the broader discussion as it impacts many kinds of design https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average

musebox35 1y ago
Brilliant, I have always felt that one of the major problems with machine learning, consequently LLMs, is the boring average based loss functions that under-represent the unique and the rare. It seems our collective civilization is using a similar function and heading in the same direction of optimizing for the average.
- leoedin 1y ago
  The world is rapidly homogenising. You see it with “air space” interior design - coffee shops have the same aesthetic in every major city in the world. You see it in local fashions. You see it as a tourist - travel anywhere in the world and the chances are you’ll find the same kind of shop selling the same kind of trinket. Made in China with a subtly different graphic on it to represent the country you’re in.
  - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
    This has been happening ever since trade routes were established across Eurasia (Silk Road) or the Americas were discovered. It only keeps accelerating as movement and trade becomes easier. If pockets of humanity could isolate themselves from the rest, we could get diversity growing again, that one sentinel island might be our only hope.

WalterBright 1y ago

Cars all look the same now because, due to fuel economy regulations, they are all designed in a wind tunnel to minimize drag. Also, regulations cover all kinds of things, mainly to reduce injury to pedestrians. You cannot even tell if a car is a Ferrari these days, unless you can see the badge.

scandox 1y ago
> reduce injury to pedestrians Strange then that everyone around me is driving some kind of high fronted armoured car
- WalterBright 1y ago
  I think trucks are exempt from a lot of those rules.
- goodcanadian 1y ago
  I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with reducing injury to pedestrians and everything to do with reducing injury to occupants.
aloha2436 1y ago
> You cannot even tell if a car is a Ferrari these days, unless you can see the badge. This seems like excessive hyperbole, I can reliably tell apart every marque on the road in my country by lights and grille shape.
- WalterBright 1y ago
  So you can't tell from the side?
  - antonvs 1y ago
    The current Ferrari lineup helpfully has a badge on the side. But even without that, something like the SF90 is pretty recognizable from the side: https://www.gtrent.com/upload/images/modelli/ferrari/sf90_spider/ferrari_sf90_spider_dimensioni.png https://www.gtrent.com/upload/images/modelli/ferrari/sf90_sp...

grues-dinner 1y ago

I think also a century of margin squeeze has trimmed off basically all the fat. Get rid of finials, cornices, non-standard windows, and then look for the next victim. It's like in the 60s everyone decided that more modern means more simple and we've only stripped back from then on. Everything from machine tools to appliances and housing has much less decoration now that it used to. Industrial stuff is all very clean and tidy in painted cubes and blocks of flats and houses are very shipshape and AirBnB fashion, but there's no heart in a lot of it. Part of it is manufacturing techniques - when you had hand made features and hand-sculpted cast components, there's an innate organic nature. With modern CAD/CAM and materials handling, sheet, slab and bar is often the order of the day, and even plastic mouldings tend towards utilitarian. High end stuff can still get a nice-looking casting, but it's a premium value-add, whereas previously the whole unit was premium. Oddly, it's never been cheaper in labour to get a plaster decoration made, but you can hardly get them, whereas they were sold in catalogues by the ton when they were carefully hand-moulded. And yes, things are far cheaper in many ways (housing excepted), so it's not all bad news, but it's just very sterile. Which is a shame because I'm fairly sure that nearly everyone except for some die-hard Brutalists and float glass manufacturers actually love pretty buildings and even originally mildly interesting buildings become tourist attractions among the glass slabs and cubes today.

tpm 1y ago
> It's like in the 60s everyone decided that more modern means more simple and we've only stripped back from then on. That actually started way sooner than in the 60s. For a good starting point see the 1910 essay Ornament and Crime from Adolf Loos, but even that was a bit after the cultural change already started, though before it was widely applied. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornament_and_Crime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornament_and_Crime
hilbert42 1y ago
"Get rid of finials, cornices, non-standard windows, and then look for the next victim." Well, I live in a house built in the Victorian era and I love my cornices and architraves decorated with classical shapes that go back to antiquity—astragals, cavettos and such—and my cedar doors, panelling, window sills, skirting boards again all shaped with classical mouldings—ogees, coves, ovolos, cymae, scotias, beadings, etc mostly together in various architecturally-pleasing combinations. And, yes, my house even has a finial on top. These days, it's unfortunate that many of us never give much consideration to or take time to even look at these decorative shapes let alone examine them carefully. Shame really, as they aren't just fleeting fashion from the bygone Victorian era but are wonderful geometric shapes and curves that have stood the test of time, in fact they've been appreciated for at least several thousand years. "Oddly, it's never been cheaper in labour to get a plaster decoration made, but you can hardly get them, whereas they were sold in catalogues by the ton when they were carefully hand-moulded." I don't consider my house to be exceptional by any stretch but still it's an ongoing testament to both good design and to the excellent skills of craftsmen who built it. That build quality is just not available today despite builders and carpenters having excellent timesaving tools not available in yesteryears. Moreover, those classical geometric curves cut into the woodwork in my house weren't done with modern machinery (say a spindle moulder) but planed by hand with either a wooden hand plane or a combination plane like the Stanley No. 45†, and cutting mouldings this way is difficult and requires considerable skill (I know, I've had to do it when making repairs). Unfortunately, as you've mentioned, modern CAD/CAM and other industrial tech has made manufacturing easier than ever and yet design (and often quality) have almost hit rock bottom. Whether it's building houses or computers and or any numbers of things, design is almost nonexistent; or little or no thought has been given to the ergonomics of how products are used (I'm continually whingeing on HN about the terrible ergonomics of much software produced these days). These aren't isolated cases, recently on separate occasions I've purchased cargo-type work pants (different brands) and the special smartphone pockets in both aren't deep enough to do the zipper up, my normal sized phone protrudes about a cm above the zipper (it's a great feature to prevent phone loss but totally useless if it can't be zipped). How the fuck can something as obvious as that happen? I've come to the conclusion it's a combination of manufacturers maximizing profit and the fact that too few complain, a general drop in aesthetic appreciation across society and our disposable throwaway culture: "who cares if it doesn't look good or it's buggy, we'll be chucking it out in a year or so anyway." _ † I own a Stanley No. 45, if look carefully in these links you'll see numbers of its plane irons have curved cutting surfaces that conform to the geometry of those curves. https://www.carters.com.au/index.cfm/index/9072-woodworking-tools-planes-planes-combination/ https://www.carters.com.au/index.cfm/index/9072-woodworking-... https://www.jimbodetools.com/products/complete-set-of-22-cutters-for-stanley-no-45-combination-plow-plane-in-original-box-89509 https://www.jimbodetools.com/products/complete-set-of-22-cut...

marssaxman 1y ago

> The glass slab design won out over all the others. It is a shame that this is true, because I have never loved any slab-of-glass phone the way I loved my old BlackBerries. I just can't type properly without physical feedback; I'm constantly making and correcting typos, all slow and awkward. The phone no longer feels like a tool ought to feel: an extension of myself into the world - it's just some gadget I'm obligated to carry around and put up with.

eightysixfour 1y ago
I had an interesting experience with this - I have a friend who talks about their phone and its keyboard exactly how you do, so I asked to watch them type something out on the keyboard. He painstakingly erases every mistyped letter along the way and demand precision that is impossible given the constraints. When I type on a phone keyboard, it is a tool for communicating, not for typing, and I type word-wise instead of letter-wise and use the autocorrect/correction bar liberally. I'll do maybe one or two more manual edits when I am fully done typing. I tried to get him to try this approach and he just couldn't do it. He needed every letter to be the one he meant to hit. When I need to type something I know autocorrect will screw up, or I am typing a URL or something it won't get right, I slow down dramatically and type like they do. Not quite swiping, but holding my finger longer to see the pop-up. Not sure if it is a worldview thing, a way the brain works thing, or something else, but it has been a long ongoing conversation between me and him about the different ways we use computer and computer adjacent devices - I'm more than happy with search-centric interfaces, he hates them and needs manual organization, etc. This carries over to AI where I perceive it as a partner in completing a task, he sees it as an unreliable and unruly tool that won't follow his precise instructions.
- marssaxman 1y ago
  My experience sounds much the same, yes. I suppose your friend also touch-types? I find it very difficult to look at my fingers instead of the text while I'm trying to write - it's so distracting! - but of course that makes it tougher to hit the simulated keys I mean to press. I suspect that people who never learned to type properly might have an easier time of it. This likely compounds: when some task will be an order of magnitude easier if I wait to do it on a computer, I'm unlikely to bother attempting it on a phone, so I likely never spend enough time trying to write on a phone to develop fluency with its interface. I never use autocorrect or any sort of typing-assistance features, on the phone or anywhere else. All the flashing and zooming is unbearably distracting, and the machine guesses wrong often enough that it feels like more hindrance than help. I have not yet spent enough time playing with AI tools to have developed much of an opinion about them, but I can easily imagine why your friend might feel that way - I, too, have very little patience for unruly tools! If I have to think about the tool, and manage it, and can't just wield it as an extension of my mind, it usually feels better to just do the work by hand, even if that would take longer.

tonyedgecombe 1y ago

Also coffee shops and air bnbs: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2024/jan/16/the-tyranny-of-the-algorithm-why-every-coffee-shop-looks-the-same https://www.theguardian.com/news/2024/jan/16/the-tyranny-of-...