What the article describes is correct, but I don't think the words "average" or "homogeneity" or "conformity" are the right terms, as they seem to carry negative connotations here. Rather, the right word is "convergence".
The point is, people like certain things aesthetically. It used to be that artists and designers were still trying to figure out what looks good, and trying all the things. But now we've tried so many things and we've gotten better at zeroing in the precise aesthetics viewers and consumers want. We've converged.
Sure, you can design electric toothbrush branding that "stands out", but it's probably going to result in less sales. Because most people don't want to express their unique personality via their electric toothbrush, they just want a nice slim white object that blends into their sink area.
The great mistake that this article makes is thinking that people need to be constantly expressing themselves in some unique way that nobody's ever done before. But the world has almost 8 billion people, few things are as unique as you think.
Can't we just enjoy having nice things? Even if those things have converged aesthetically? They've converged because we think they're nice. Things don't need to be different just for the sake of being different. Because different can also be worse.
> Even if those things have converged aesthetically?
But they haven't converged aesthetically any more than preferences have been absolutely overwritten, overridden, and overprinted by whatever is most easy to produce today. Your comment somewhat assumes that where we are is the ultimate endpoint of some long process, when in reality fads come and go. Tastes change. What is out there now is no more inevitable than bell bottoms might have seemed in the 1970s.
Sure, maybe its just nostalgia, but there were plenty of trends and aesthetics from my younger years that are just nowhere to be found. Why? Because when people renovate, they go with the aesthetic de jure, what's available and what the social pressures are. Hardly anyone is going to renovate a 1980s basement and put in...1980s carpet. Can't be sourced, and people think it looks ugly.
> They've converged because we think they're nice. Things don't need to be different just for the sake of being different. Because different can also be worse.
No, things have converged because lots of people with no taste[1] just ho-hummed along with the zeitgest. The zeitgeist just so happens to be a bland sameness and characterless, charmless, antiseptically clean and dead grayness that we see on all the HGTV shows and AirBnBs. Different is frigging great if you ask me. At least, different than that. Give me the inside of a 1985 McDonalds instead of this, TBH! What makes something pretty and cool and interesting is skill, thoughtfulness and some sense of composition, color, and togetherness. Today it's a thoughtless cheap imitation made at scale.
> No, things have converged because lots of people with no taste[1] just ho-hummed along with the zeitgest.
You buy what you can afford. Whether that be a shotgun shack with second-hand traipings or a McMansion with IKEA furniture.
AirBNB's are optimizing for cheap, easy to clean and maintain, but still providing the minimum expected features. If you want variety, go to actual B&Bs.
The big mistake the artists in the first part did was to average all input, instead of cluster analyzing the input to discover more than one average type. On average, most people like nature, so nature is what you're going to get. A better test would be to have an art museum with diverse art, and then see which paintings attract the most interest, or even better, which patterns emerge when tracing many individuals throughout the museum.
I actually find the paintings fairly diverse, both in their individual content, and when compared to each other. But a person who has a mind to average everything will, of course, find a lot of similarity between them.
People still reupholster old furniture. I think the real problem is that many goods these days are either so cheap it's cheaper to replacement them entirely, or not built to last, so they never get to a rebuild stage.
Indeed, and all the local (and unfortunately global incentives, like GDP) are aligned for production, not wealth preservation and quality of life. The reupholster option is the most efficient wealth preservation option and saves production capacity for making new furniture for other people.
Since birth rate is below reproduction in most of the world, and population declines (slowly or faster) basically everywhere in the "developed world", even including China, there will be fewer and fewer "other people".
We'll have to produce less and less if we do not keep replacing existing stuff with new (hopefully superior) stuff.
And this is a big deal, too. We've made huge strides in cars and appliances. Outside of specialty needs furniture and carpentry hasn't changed much over the years.
> there will be fewer and fewer "other people".
This is going to take a long time (when measured over the typical human lifespan), and won't be very noticeable outside of child-oriented institutions. Major changes in industries and other events that prompt large numbers of people to move will still be more noticeable.
The transition of Japan from a fast growing "tiger" to a society with few children, older people dominating, and contracting industry occurred very much within my lifetime, and I'm not an old person yet.
The bespoke stuff is expensive, since there's literally only 1 customer. Think mega yachts.
The 'almost everybody can afford this' is because it's sold to everybody, and thus economies of scale _allows_ it to be affordable.
The old 'middle ground', to me, is a pre-industrial idea that locally sourced craftsman and materials can be used to serve just the local region. It no longer exists because it _can_ no longer exist (except as a sort of cottage industry, or artisanal industry which is hugely inefficient and thus barely anyone buys such things).
In furniture, for example, the old middle ground (20th century) was hundreds of factories, churning out regional furniture that was shipped to cities that had multiple showrooms with reputations based on their curation. This wasn't as expensive as bespoke furniture, but much more than Ikea, or ChinaDirect.
In the US North Carolina, Illinois, New York, Michigan, Massachusetts, all had furniture industries. I don't know if that was better, but it was definitely different, much more diverse, less affordable, but higher quality. Clothes worked pretty similarly.
Within a brief time, the company employed 32 people and manufactured tables, chairs, and a bedroom set. The solid-oak bedroom set sold for nine dollars and included a bed, dresser, and washstand.
In 1886 the average daily wage for a laborer was about $1.47 ( https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015059385339&vi... ). So that bedroom set would be a week's wage. That's a really good price, even today. And it was solid oak (harder to come by these days given the decline in old growth forests).
The thing about clothes is they were made to last because of the high price of labor for their making. Once automation really took off following WW2 they became a lot cheaper, and so were treated cheaper. And also weren't repaired nearly as often.
It most stuck out to me when the article talked about car colors - most cars are black or white because car makers mostly make black or white. Buying a car with a splash of color is hard. Red is your best chance. Followed by butt-ugly blues.
You cannot meaningfully choose according to your taste because choice is restricted. (Related, try to buy furniture that isn't a fucking cheap imitation of mid-century modern)
And that happened because offerening the most bland and inoffensive looks will be bought by the vast majority of people who don't care about taste, or don't have any. (How would you develop taste if all the choices are the same)
It's bland things for bland lives reinforcing more bland choices in product design. Mixing all colors gets a dull grey, and that's where we're landing.
Safety is an under appreciated function of car color. I've had a number of same looking cars of different color. I noticed that driving a white version results in substantially less near miss/near accidents while driving.
I will only buy white cars now because of this. I'm tired of dodging inattentive drivers that are sleepdriving through their commute or whatever they are doing besides driving.
Manufacturers mostly make black or white cars because that's what people want. Modern culture has made people so boringly conventional that there's no point in manufacturers painting on different colours, so they charge a premium or don't do it at all. Your explanation fails to explain why exactly the same trend is happening in fashion. Is there some conspiracy where clothing manufacturers are trying to restrict choice in clothing, too? At some point, you have to question the culture at large rather than individual industries.
> What makes something pretty and cool and interesting is skill, thoughtfulness and some sense of composition, color, and togetherness.
This is key, yet it highlights an important aspect largely missing from these critiques of popular aesthetics: Any style popular enough to become hegemonic will itself contain examples spanning a wide range of quality and taste. There are beautiful expressions of the AirBnB interior, the NHTSA-approved car, even the five-over-one low-rise, just as there is also a sea of mediocre variations on them.
A style alone does not make a designed object or space high-taste or low-taste, good or bad; it is the values of good design and craftsmanship that make it thus.
I think that's a bit reductive. Part of what's missing here is personality, or what I would call unique mediocrity. People who have no idea what they're doing just deciding to paint a wall yellow because they feel like it. The issue isn't just that some apartments have craftsmanship and others don't: it's that the high-skill and low-skill efforts look superficially the same.
Think about it with Marvel or Star Wars movies. There are some really good ones, and some really boring ones, and although you can definitely say "Thor Ragnarok" was better than "Iron Man: Age of Ultron", that doesn't change the fact that when you zoom out, it seems all we're getting is superhero and Star Wars movies, and maybe it would be nice to watch something else now and again.
We want more than just good craftsmanship. We need people of mediocre skill to be making things that are weird and interesting.
Weird and interesting are a part of individual behavior, and unfortunately our economy is trending towards more consolidation.
The urban streetscapes of older cities are dominated by very similar buildings, but often the differentiation is not just a result of the architecture but of the tenants. You have multiple buildings, multiple landlords, and multiple tenants, and the combinatoric permutations of all of them produce interesting variation on just a single city block.
These days, the modern five over one probably takes an entire block or at least half of one, and the relevant landlords or HOAs basically all but forbid tenant individuality. For example, I have a balcony, but I’m not allowed to hang clothes, or flags, or art, or anything, and so the only thing that is actually out there is some basic outdoor furniture. Businesses with storefronts in these buildings also have similar restrictions, because today’s corporate landlords are used to sterile, manicured environments like malls.
No, the five over one section mostly talks about architectural choices, which is important to a degree.
This is more of an elaboration; people don’t see architectural renders when they walk down the street, they see the combination of building and tenant.
The most obvious manifestation of this is storefront areas; in old shopping districts in New York you’ll see a variety of awning shapes and colors, whereas in newer developments if you are even allowed to have one they must match every other one on the building.
the push towards homogenous zeitgest has always existed. I think what's more accentuated in the modern times, is the world-wide convergence because we have made communication across vast geographical areas instantenous. with modern phones, and internet, everyone everywhere pretty much has visual access to the same things. Now convergence is not just local, it's global in scope.
This is an interesting point, but I disagree that it has been around forever. I'd posit this is elementary of the state. But the state emerged not so long ago in an otherwise massive tract of history. And as to globalism, that's only somewhat correct. There are pieces of antiquity found all throughout the world, indicative of huge trade networks. Feathers from South America found on the East Coast of North America and artifacts of the Indus Valley people found in Western Europe. The speed at which that happens is, I don't think, particularly relevant. Even once in possession of such information the consequences are seldom manifest immediately. It's as much about maintaining the status quo and hierarchical stability as it is the process of civil evolution.
And it's easy to explain why: the more similar people are the more predictable and thus more controllable they become. Anyone in a position of power would love it if every word spoken was agreed upon and acted out as if their imagination was manifest. If every element of a given state was mechanistic rather than organic. Of course businesses are little states in their own way.
An interesting [unsourced] aside: I remember some comedian talking about their comeup, and that once they had what they wanted they became depressed. Telling the same jokes to different crowds and getting the same laughs over and over again. Peering into how easily people can be won, manipulated... I think it was Birbiglia. Be careful what you wish for, I guess.
> Sure, maybe its just nostalgia, but there were plenty of trends and aesthetics from my younger years that are just nowhere to be found. Why? Because when people renovate, they go with the aesthetic de jure, what's available and what the social pressures are. Hardly anyone is going to renovate a 1980s basement and put in...1980s carpet.
And were people in the 1980s using furniture from the 1940s when they renovated? If not, embrace the fact that things change and will always change. I bet the 1980s aesthetics are going to get a revival at some point.
> embrace the fact that things change and will always change.
Living in a European city for a few years got me thinking about what the sources of changes are. Everything, and I mean everything requires maintenance, or it will crumble into dust. That maintenance is like a running cost. For (what we consider today to be) high-value jewels of the past, we pay this cost, because we like having these amazing things--like cathedrals and churches and minarets and bridges and monuments and works of art. This maintenance is literally fighting the forces of entropy. Fall behind, and it will crumble and disappear. When it crumbles or is old or broken, or even destroyed--e.g. after WWII--will you rebuild what was there, as it was, or do something new because it strikes your fancy?
In Europe, they draw the line very differently than in North America. Much of the old is maintained, rebuilt, preserved. Because it is considered wealth in itself. Because people fight these forces of entropy, honor their past, and heck, maybe even like things? As an American, I see we do not do this. We seem to hate things. We hate buildings and bridges and doorknobs and pipes[1]; partly because most stuff is built like cheap crap--no matter the era--so of course it falls down and needs to be rebuilt. And it is, the cheapest way possible, usually. Today it seems to be being rebuilt all in a particular way. I dunno, I just think America's total disregard for the past is infecting the rest of the world.
[1] Not above-ground power lines, poles, and endless ugly nests of wires, though. Obviously. Those friggin power lines are going to be the absolute last thing that anybody tears down.
Just to be a devil's advocate: yes, construction in the US generally doesn't last as long as in the "old world". But on the other hand, look at how hard it is to take a beautiful 17th century stone building and make it as energy efficient as modern construction. Same with just about every other internal quality-of-life feature - the old building wins on feng shui and other ineffable valuations, but fails in terms of every day to day and efficiency/cost metric. Yes, it can seem stupid to be tearing down and rebuilding a 50-100 old house when you compare it to old-world behavior, but building technology has moved along at a pace almost as rapid as computational tech, and there's an argument to be made for benefitting from that rather than being hamstrung by "old beauty".
In Austria, new homes often have the outer look of older, traditional houses, but can be incredibly energy efficient (e.g. 40cm walls with really good interior insulation), high efficient heat pumps, hot-water heating, etc.
I've tried making this same point when it comes to auto designs (at least in the competitive, cost-sensitive ones). A lot of mid-sized cars look the same because the design constraints generally converge on the same handful of principles. They've converged not in the aesthetic sense as much as the engineering sense: because they work at a relatively low cost.
(I'm speaking mainly about things like aerodynamics here, not necessarily EV-vs-ICE etc.)
Even if they had to ultra-optimize the aerodynamics so all the cars look like the same bar of soap (they don't have to), they could still at least paint the damn soap a different color. But, no. All you see coming out of the factory are white, silver, gray, black, the occasional red and the occasional blue.
What's driving this? That's what the article is about. Is it actually pull from customers, or is it push from the manufacturers? Is it: people all actually demand boring white soapbar shaped cars -> companies make boring white soapbar shaped cars? Or is it the other way around: Companies are economically incentivized to offer only a small number of colors and styles -> customer really doesn't have a choice -> customer buys what's available -> companies think that's what they really want because of their purchase choice.
Same with the AirBNB look. Do people really like it, which translates into more rentals copying the look? Or are the landlords just uncreative, all copying each other, and that's all that ends up on the market? Or is something else driving it?
There are a lot of good reasons for "the AirBNB look. White walls reflect ambient light and can enhance existing light sources. This can help make up for small (i.e: cheap) windows or limited light fixtures.
Natural wood is durable but not hard and cold like metal or glass, nor will it break down and end up permeating your cell membranes like plastic. Exposed beams make ceilings more interesting visually but also dampen echoes and make a space feel less sterile and prison-like.
Humans have been living in shelters made from wood and stone since the beginning. It wouldn't surprise me if affinity toward these materials shows up somewhere in our DNA.
It's often just fashion, not actual affinity for natural materials.
The "AirBnB look" IME is usually engineered wood (aka bits of wood + liberal amounts of adhesive) floor, or even vinyl (tile if they're fancy), not natural wood. Natural wood scratches too easily and is more expensive to deal with generally. So for a rental? Nah. But yeah in actually older places sometimes it's natural wood liberally coated with basically-plastic clear coat. ;)
A lot of the exposed beams are also not "real" structural beams. Often they're plastic too! Stuff like this. Lower maintenance, doncha know. https://www.architecturaldepot.com/BM.html
Reasonably acceptable coffee without demanding skill (aeropress, barista machine), potentially creating mess (anything using fresh grounds), or needing much in the way of regular cleaning & maintenance (any of the full-service machines which contain a dairy refrigerator). Inexpensive and mostly idiot-proof. Just ignore the grotesque environmental waste of the pods.
I'm surprised they didn't call it Architectural Digest look.
Empty palatial interiors staged to appear on magazine covers, but not necessarily lived in by actual humans. Sometimes, I wonder if the the AD places are empty investment homes / porn shoot locations.
As a millennial, like much of my generation who loves good coffee, I'd say it's primarily because we don't want the usual shitty instant coffee packets - Nespresso & similar is a good way to get a decent coffee without too much faff/cleaning (ie my proper machine at home is more expensive, harder to clean & maintain in an airbnb context).
For previous generations the same effect would've been before hotel rooms had TVs; there would have been a stark difference between hotel rooms that did and didn't have TVs for boomers (and maybe GenX?)
Car paint colors are driven by pull from franchised dealers and the dealership financing model, as well as by push from supply chain issues. In the US at least, most mainstream consumers expect to buy a car from dealer inventory and drive it away that day. So dealers mostly order only a few bland colors because most consumers are willing to settle for those as long as the car has the options they want and they get a good price. Like maybe you would prefer a bright green car but will settle for gray because the dealer offers low-interest financing. Dealers also incur inventory costs (floorplan financing) and their business model depends on rapid turnover so they can't afford to order "lot poison" that sits for months waiting for the right customer. Reducing color choices also simplifies manufacturing operations.
Some luxury or performance oriented car brands such as Porsche and Tesla do allow color orders from a wider palette, sometimes to the extent of even doing custom paint blending to match a customer sample. But those customers are willing to wait longer and pay more. They don't need basic transportation to get to work tomorrow.
Tesla have reduced their palette to just five colors, presumably to cut costs.
Porsche is the leader in paint color choice, no doubt about that, with 14 basic colors plus custom options. And to your point, consumers are willing to wait for the Porsche factory to build their car, rather than driving one off the lot that day.
Aston Martin probably has them beat by a landslide for number of colors. They offer well over 100 colors.
Actual Porsche prices out the door look like about $100,000 (even though MSRP for the cheapest models are a lot less). Please correct me if Porsche is significantly cheaper than Aston Martin vantage ($150k)… to me anything between $100k-200k seems like the same market segment but maybe I’m just poor.
I sold cars for a decade. I love red cars. Atleast at the brands I worked for, dealers specd out their own vehicles including colors and interiors. We ordered a lot of black white greys because they are the easiest to sell.
If someone likes a car in general, almost anyone will accept either black or white or grey, even if you would like red (rare).
If you like a car, and all they have is red, while you dislike red (very common), you don't buy it.
Dealerships have been around for 100 years and make millions of dollars for their owners. They're not operated by stupid people.
I believe a lot of it has to do with resale value. People want to be able to trade in their car for maximum value, and picking the color with the widest appeal helps with that. This seems to have created a feedback loop where car manufacturers ship more of the "boring" colors because that's what customers are buying.
This also applies to things like computers: A cursory search on ebay shows that a silver iMac generally sells for more than an equivalent yellow iMac, for example. For someone who trades in their old equipment when buying new, this is a big deal.
Odd colors actually have the best resale value on the used market. A yellow Porsche is very hard to sell new. Very few are made and sold in yellow because dealers don't spec them that way. 10 years later, if you try to sell a black Porsche, you have 72 others competing with you. If you try to sell a yellow Porsche, the buyer will fly from across the US to buy it from you.
>Very few are made and sold in yellow because dealers don't spec them that way
Dealers aren't speccing them yellow because they don't sell as well as other colors. If people were lining up for yellow Porsches, dealers would absolutely be ordering more yellow Porsches.
Odd colors may be priced differently at the top of the market for used cars (I don't know), but that's just not true for the typical car used buyer.
The problem isn't that fewer unusual colors are made.
The problem is that no unusual colors are made in almost all car models.
There are a very small handful of models that have a few particular colors beyond the basic black/white/red/silver/dark blue options, but otherwise manufacturers have decided that because fewer people want yellow (or bright blue, or pink, or orange, or magenta), no one gets those colors. Ever.
Even the new Miata's color options are gray-scale, red, very dark blue, and sand. Worth mentioning that you can just buy wraps for wacky colors while protecting your paint and resale value, maybe that's part of it.
I specifically wrote that a new yellow Porsche is difficult to sell.
People will travel for used cars. New car buyers want to pick a car. A few new car buyers do spec out custom orders and wait, but it's very rare. In general, that's atleast how half the crazy colors come into the market.
Fwiw, the explicit advice I got from my parents about cars/houses was to never choose a unique looking one. I was told odd-colored cars are more likely to be broken into, and houses that draw attention (if placed in a neighborhood of otherwise very similar houses) are more likely to be robbed.
So even if my favorite color was an easy option when choosing a car, I'd probably go monochrome as long as that's what the majority of other cars are doing, almost entirely for property crime reasons.
On writing this out, I have absolutely 0 idea how factually-based this is, but it is at least a thing some middle-class Americans tell their kids.
There's an old thought that red/yellow sports cars are more likely to get tickets because they are more noticeable. No idea if that's just lore or if data bears it out.
It's very unlikely. Once you control for the type of car (minivan, sports car, etc) and type of person buying the car (young/old, male/female), red cars get similar amount of tickets to other colors.
People repeat this for decades... Apparently never noticing that they have never ever been asked for the color of their car when getting an insurance quote.
> All you see coming out of the factory are white, silver, gray, black, the occasional red and the occasional blue.
Isn't this just fashion?
I've heard it argued that times of popular optimism and plenty tend to favour bright colours, extravagant design and conspicuous consumption. Think Calvin Klein underpants deliberately on show above low slung waistbands, analogous to frilly lace ruffs and cuffs in earlier ages.
Times of austerity tend to be associated with muted shades, and perhaps virtue signalling rather than wealth signalling.
Since the 2008 banking crises I think we've been firmly in the the dull, serious phase.
> What's driving this? That's what the article is about. Is it actually pull from customers, or is it push from the manufacturers?
It's both. Most people don't want a gray car as their first choice, but it's probably more people's second choice than a real color. So red cars sit on the lot for 15.3 days, blue ones for 14.2, and gray for 11.6. Obviously (in MBA terms) the dealer, should order more gray cars. So they sell more gray cars, and the feedback loop means it's now hard to find a blue or red car because, if you ask a dealer, "nobody" buys them. So now the manufacturer just stops making those colors, which makes their life easier, and the cycle is complete.
I begrudgingly have a gray truck and my wife has a silver SUV, because those were basically the only options available, many brands now you can't get a decent color selection if you special order them.
> so all the cars look like the same bar of soap (they don't have to)
they do have to, though. updated standards to fuel efficiency and crash safety.
there are only so many ways to make that happen -- an aerodynamic, fuel efficient bumper that also meets safety requirements -- and still be cheap enough for the average person.
So I checked the local market and while metallic grey is the most popular here in Ireland, white is fifth, compared to its clear first place when I've been to California. White is established in popular culture as the colour of transit vans and small traders, which isn't an image that inspires demand in personal vehicles. I think in recent years, Tesla marketing has rehabilated the image of white cars a little, but I don't see them getting US levels of use in the near future, especially as there aren't actually that many Tesla's being sold here.
So I think there's some level of marketers adapting to at least what they think works in the market rather than simple volume discounts on white paint.
There's a very boring, practical thing that most of those colors have in common. White, silver, and gray make your typical road dirt less visible. Black also accomplishes this pretty well in climates where they don't need to salt the roads.
Blue and red are common favorite colors, so it's not surprising you get a little of those. Brown and tan used to be very common up until the late 80's or so; I'm not sure why that went away but that's the only one that seems surprisingly absent.
I'm a digital nomad. I've lived in a lot of Airbnbs, and I love the Airbnb look. You know why? Because when landlords are trying to get creative, the result is usually horrible.
Getting creative, if you're not a specialist in the field, would yield horrible results 95% of the time. Which is okay if you're doing it as a hobby, of course. But as a customer, I really don't want to be subjected to this.
And Airbnbs where landlords have actually hired a competent interior designer usually have "Luxe" brand and are clearly targeted towards people in a completely different tax bracket.
Maybe that has more to do with your specific taste though? For me personally, I think my tastes have changed over time where I think I enjoy a bit more variety/chaos in terms of decoration and environment compared to the sterile greige look that's currently popular.
That is a good point as well, it's also a template that can be used. These people are financially motivated, it's cheaper to just use an existing and proven aesthetic to target a particular demographic than come up with something unique that may or may not work.
It's certainly not millennials that are renting out these airbnbs, but I'm sure are heck we're mostly the ones staying in them.
Companies like selling cars, so I think they pick colors most people prefer. "Exciting" "Unique" colors look a bit silly or non-unique when your neighbors have the same color. If what you are asking for is 1000 color choices instead of 10, that's obviously more expensive to mass produce or customize.
I’d argue that convergence _is_ soulless-ness and cars present a great example of the point.
The “soul” of something that is inanimate is the qualities that make it memorable or stick it in our mind with some manner of tactility. Not literal tactility but the nature of how you can visualize something so clearly it’s almost like you can touch it in your mind.
I’m getting a bit spacey here but let’s get concrete: Jeremy Clarkson often posited that a car tended lacked soul if it was refined and well put together. Often, he felt like older Italian cars, with all of their questionable design decisions were very soulful, because they reflect the fact that people, fallible human beings built it. It was a product of them, as much as a piece of art is purely a product of its artist. It’s why a Van Gogh has soul but a Van Gogh replica does not.
The effort to make things perfect and completely refined with no strange decisions removes the humanity from them. Renders them soulless.
I think of Nader’s Unsafe at any speed which pointed out how numerous stylistic features in old cars were dangerous: for instance you could get spiked by a hood ornament, slashed by tail fins, etc.
People tend to think of cars as an old technology but cars are under intense regulatory (and commercial, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurance_Institute_for_Highwa...) pressure on issues like safety, emissions, noise, and fuel economy. A narrowbody airliner today can be based on a 1967 design with almost-state-of-the-art engines and nowhere-near-state-of-the-art avionics and control systems but there is no room on our roads for a new car based on a 1967 design.
With all of the requirements acting on cars it is little wonder that looks go by the wayside.
Yes, I agree. My point is more akin to addressing why it happens in a somewhat different context than the article which states it's driven by customer subjective taste.
I'm saying it can also be driven by something else. There are probably only a few major players in the automotive aerodynamic software design space. Unlike the days when the design was driven by an artist with a block of clay, I suspect modern designs are often based on the same computer driven models with the same underlying physics. The software is probably a more refined and optimized approach, but this results in a convergence in looks and a lack of that idiosyncratic "soul"
We have troubles at work dealing with more than ~50 souls in our monkeysphere. Do we really benefit from 100 or more souls in our homes, one for every appliance and piece of furniture?
I agree that convergence is soullessness, both on the part of the producer and consumer who is choosing the default or merely practical. That's fine for those who only see cars as a means of transportation. A 'better looking' (according to those 'with taste') shape of a car doesn't have to cost more intrinsically. The reason we have many similar, not so great looking cars is because it's not a primary filter for sales volume. Something that paints outside convergent lines, is however a reason why a potential buyer would not buy it.
Poor quality can give a car a kind of personality, but that's not the soul of it. The same car could be reliable and have the same soul. The main difference is whether it is developed to a specific vision, or if checking boxes and aggregated by committee.
AFAIK, the reason cars look the same is that they are optimized to use the same mass-produced parts. Not really because of physical, aesthetic, or usability reasons.
Yes, they often are designed to use a common platform. But I'm speaking specifically to aerodynamic shapes. The body of a car is relatively easy to change in the design phase even with the same underlying mechanical systems, but I believe they still converge on the same basic aerodynamic shapes.
There are actually quite a lot of possible shapes that don't degrade aerodynamics. If you take a look on the conception of any modern car, you'll see that the original design is always completely different from the one it gets after it's adapted to factory.
You’re probably right, it’s more about aero + production constraints. I don’t think the concept cars use the same constraints, which is why they have to change to get to production. Even if a design looks different and is still aerodynamic it doesn’t mean it can be economically produced without large changes to the production process.
I’ve only worked in body panel stamping in automotive assembly as a controls engineer, so I may be taking a bit out of school here.
I think that's why "average" is felt as a tyranny.
Sure these vehicles make sense in a cost vs aerodynamics for a base set of functionality. But taking a step back, not everyone want the same base functionalities, nor have the same need or desire of cost vs aerodynamics.
At an extreme some people want a golf cart that have some trunk capacity and is road legal. At another extreme some want a practical but "fun" to drive car. Others want a mid-sized car that can somewhat fit two mountain bikes without being too much a trouble to use as a daily commuting car.
These could all have optimized, wildly different designs, but it's more cost effective to cut off the minority cases and aim for an average that somewhat pays lip services to each specific case. And the more the cost effective average option is prioritized, the costlier it becomes to have a custom design for a niche use case, creating a vicious circle.
To take another industry, we're seeing that in laptop computers: Macbooks nail the average with perfection, and that also means there's no way to get a big screen low power laptop from Apple, for instance. In comparison smaller makers have more niche models, Lenovo or Asus have wild models that are probably commercially possible because they don't try to catter to everyone with a single laptop line in the first place.
In the United States, size is one attribute in which cars have not converged.
Cars keep growing bigger, for no sensible reason. That demand was created by aggressive marketing (encouraging Americans to attach their egos to their cars) and fearmongering (people feeling the need to get larger cars to protect themselves from other, ever larger cars).
> They've converged because we think they're nice.
Here is the trap. We think they are nice because globalisation works on a more profound level. The "visible" level of globalisation are the consumer products. What's also transmitted are certain intellectual ideas and schools of thought, certain aesthetics and forms of art. For example, the attempts to explain the economy on an individual behavioural and psychological basis are pretty much a post-WW2 Western thing and now it has pervaded the world. Every non-English self-help book reads like a similar US book. In a way, these ideas transform the local cultures and now everybody thinks like the West and wants the same things as the West.
How would you differentiate "true" convergence, where everyone agrees a certain idea is superior, vs what you seem to describe here, a sort of imposition of ideas?
I often revist the ideas of Brooks; are we converging on the essense, the "conceptual integrity"? or the superficial, the accidental? I also recognize that there's unlikley to be a single dimension for convergence. The individual will define the balance and acceptable tolerances to it.
I also used to think that ubiquity was some sort of evidence of superiority. However, as was briefly mentioned upthread, you realize that often ubiquity has more to do with consumer products and the monopolies that capture markets. And ubiquitous consumer products often do not achieve that status due to superior design, but actually superior profit margins, which in the realm of manufactured consumer products, means the most efficient design for the most efficient manufacturing method. You realize that the manufacturing process can influence the design. The most ubiquitous door, urinal, toilet, and hand dryer are often not the most aesthetically pleasing or even, design-wise, most sensibility designed, but just the cheapest to purchase, most efficient to manufacture, or the only option.
So to answer your question, we typically call the latter in cultural studies capitalism.
I don't think we should conflate ubiquity with superiority, but it is easy to see how the latter often leads to the former. Perhaps Western movies are indeed considered very good, even by people from other cultures, which is why they decide to watch them. Or perhaps the cars invented last century, first developed in the West, already found some optimal designs that are simply more efficient, and therefore will be widely adopted.
Your implied explanation is rather bleak, as it seems that capitalism is independent of consumer wants or needs in this perspective.
It could be a trap if you value diversity or it could be a good thing if you value supra-national uniformity across continents, where people act the same way, think and build the same way, want the same cars and want the same visual traits in women.
I like weird shit a lot more than the next guy, and I think you're being pointlessly melodramatic about it. Convergent evolution of tastes is not the same as fascism.
It's much worse. It's global submission to the machine, which is not even a political project. What is easy, convenient, efficient, from a machine perspective, therefore is aspirational, desirable, wholesome from a human perspective. This is what's happening.
We are all becoming widgets, that is to say, mere participants in bureaucracies, cogs in mechanized processes. Compare the existential dread people experienced in the 1800s when the factory mode of production reduced people to skinner pigeons, how it alienated labor. Now, we've completed submitted to this alienation, in fact, even celebrate it. For example, think some Tesla promotional with a robotized factory floor and a single worker with some doodad pressing buttons. A truly dystopian sight, yet, there we are, using it as advertisement.
To repeat the question a couple of levels up: how would you differentiate convergence on the best (so far) solutions from "submission to the machine" ?
The outdoor gear (hiking, camping, cycling) that I use today is an order of magnitude better than the stuff I used in the 1970s. And even though the brands vary (to some degree) worldwide, the designs, features, and materials have pretty much converged everywhere. Goretex (or something like it) is better than PU-coated nylon. Angle-cut wrists with velcro closures just do work better than loose or elastic wrists. Internal frame backpacks are lighter, more comfortable and in just about every way superior to the old external frame designs. A tent that weighs 2/3 or even 1/2 of a tent from 1980 is a better tent for everything except car camping, and contemporary tents are much better at dealing with wind loads.
I could go on for a long time. How do we differentiate improvements like this, spread across the globe to the point of uniformity, from your "submission to the machine" ?
I don't dispute we've seen quality improvements in some areas. Hiking gear is a complete triviality though. Nothing stopped people from enjoying hiking 50 years ago with bad gear, and the qualitative experience of camping, "enjoying the great outdoors", communing with nature, is not better today than it was then. What has improved is maybe the convenience. The real shift is in our core surroundings, what real should matter, and there quality and diversity has completely plummeted (homes, furniture, art, ...). Outdoors people generally celebrate the inherent value of large biodiversity, but seeing diversity in human expression completely collapse is suddenly "convergence". That is what is meant by submission to the machine. Simplicity, uniformity is desirable from a machine perspective (e.g. easier to operate simple machine, easier to operate simple bureaucracy). Those values humans now have internalized as aspirational as well.
> Nothing stopped people from enjoying hiking 50 years ago with bad gea
we can't prove it's the gear, and it is likely not to be the dominant factor, but vastly more people do in fact participate in this sor of activity today than they did 50 years, so i would argue that actually, gear did play a role in "stopping people from enjoying hiking". Not "all people", but some people.
however, i feel that you're overly focused on the details of my examples. i could have picked dozens of hundreds of examples of where the things we have available today (where notable convergence in design has occured) are just better. i don't feel that you've answered my question about you would differentiate the two processes, and instead have tried to use the "outdoor gear" example as a way to simply come up with a reiteration of your initial claim.
but convergence can also just be ... convergence. People can actually agree that there's a better/best way to do something independent of other motivations.
Looking at etsy or the long list of artists on Spotify putting out music without hitting the mainstream radio, I'm not convinced the world has converged everywhere. I have far more variety that appeals to me available to me than ever before - and so does a person with opposite tastes.
Expensive to build or change things have - houses or cars - but art or more commodity products have fractured.
The people/media one is the author's biggest blind spot here: there is still a dominant mainstream that people are chasing, but it's audience is smaller than before. I think this is why they chase the same thing more aggressively. So your "bestsellers" look alike, but more people are reading random shit that would never crack that list in the past either. Selling to a niche is precisely the opposite of what gets you in the bestseller list, but the niches I like have SO MUCH STUFF available now. The non-mainstream has fractured, making the remaining mainstream look more similar to chase a narrower segment. The most watched TV shows now have a far lower percentage of the country watching, and also have more variety in what the cast as a whole looks like, whether that's hairstyle or tattoos or piercings or whatnot.
EDIT: here's an experiment to try to demonstrate. Tell me how many of those lookalike movie and book poster/cover images you've watched. And how many you'd watch more of.
Movies: I've seen 0 of those (I'm not a horror fan anyway, but I've seen a couple in the last five years, Hereditary and The Invisible Man, and they didn't look like those posters).
Self-help books: I've read 0.
I haven't been reading any Danielle Steele, John Grisham, Kathryn Stockett, or Stieg Larsson in the last 15 years either... but Grisham was much more common in my circle, and I read some, in the 90s. I had less fewer options! I read over 30 books last year, and none of them popped up in this article...
To bolster this point, the bestselling album of all time is still Michael Jackson's Thriller, released in 1982. So it has been literally over 40 years and nothing else has topped that for mainstream popularity, musically speaking. It has sold over 70 million copies. The next nearest album is AC/DC's Back in Black, released in 1980, at 50 million copies, a 20 million copy difference. A present day musician would be over the moon to sell 20 million copies. If I'm reading the charts right, the only musician to break 30 million sales for an album since 2010 has been Adele.
So, while mainstream creations may be homogenizing, independent creators are finding a larger audience than ever before. I see that as a good thing.
Even better, not only has nothing "topped" Thriller for mainstream popularity, it was also never really "copied" in any meaningful sense. The same is true of many of the most popular works of ... popular ... art. Yes, Thriller had quite an influence on pop-dance music when it came out, but who can name a single song about which the first thing anyone says is "oh, that's just like <X> from Thriller"
That is a good point. It would be interesting to see these same numbers as a ratio against worldwide album sales over time. That would give a better sense of popularity relative to their time.
There is a key difference going from "convergence" to "conformity": circular reasoning.
People who need to sell the thing they invent, tell themselves that "convergence" is the best way there. Customers like familiar traits. So they design for intentional convergence, and that is the essence of conformity.
99.99999% of keyboards are the same physical layout. This layout is a standard that conforms to the general shape of an 1800s typewriter. There is no functional need to continue this. There was no natural convergence toward this shape: it's so bad it often injures the user! The only driver is the value of familiarity to the act of selling a keyboard.
With the advent of cheap 3D printers, we have seen a surge in hobby keyboard design. These people care so much about getting a better keyboard shape that they are willing to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to get there. What they want they cannot buy; this was especially the case 5-10 years ago. The very existence of this group proves that traditional keyboards are the result of conformity, not convergence.
I would dare say that 99.99999% of keyboard users expect a similar layout. Sure, it converged out of conformity and familiarity, but so what? This is part of the added value to me, I can learn to type in a particular layout and I'm good to go in any other. This is a crucial part of functionality in fact.
You are precisely the consumer demand that drives conformity here. You are real! That doesn't change any of the other things I just said: in fact, it exasperates the issue, because it isn't wrong to target your familiarity as a reliable selling point.
The problem is that it's also a good thing to try create new designs. I have a keyboard that you would hate to use. That's how I feel about the traditional design you prefer. We can both be served by the market, but only if designers have enough confidence to do so.
You wouldn't even care about this if you had originally learned to type on my keyboard. If that was the ubiquitous thing you started with, then we wouldn't even be having this conversation. Had the progression of keyboard design been free to explore other options, it might have naturally converged on something more ergonomic; which would serve both the need for familiarity and the desire for ergonomics.
We are already seeing ergonomic keyboard designs converge to 3 shapes: Dactyl-like extreme ergonomics that place keys as close as possible to the resting fingertip; flat compromises like ergodox that can use a PCB; and grid layouts like planck that optimize the difficulty of conceptual memory layouts when using many layers. All three place keys in columns, so they are pretty easy to switch between. The only real mystery left is the thumb.
Most of the discomfort involved in switching from the typewriter layout stems from how obscure and unwieldy it is relative to anything else. Like a Who from Whoville, we look at the elegant hammer - as a replacement for the familiar Whabam - with distaste.
For almost every product out there, a "better" version is available that is not the most common one. This is simple economics: the improvements you describe are not free, which is why they are not mass produced. If people judged that these improvements that you describe are worth it to them, they would pay. The fact you could buy such a keyboard demonstrates that conformity or convergence or whatever you want to call it did not inhibit you from getting what you want.
Where I think you get it wrong is to assume that everyone has your level of interest or applies the same logic as you to every item in their lives. Hell, I'm sure you don't. So if you are happy eating from suboptimal mass-produced forks which are just SO much worse than these $500 custom-made ergonomical marvels that the average man just simply doesn't know about... welcome to the peasant club.
They weren't even minimally produced until recently!
If any "better versions" were actually a real part of the market 20 years ago, then you could buy a laptop with one today. You can't. In a $140 billion market, there is not a single laptop manufacturer producing laptops with an ergonomic or ortholinear layout. That can only be the result of conformity.
> The fact you could buy such a keyboard demonstrates that conformity or convergence or whatever you want to call it did not inhibit you from getting what you want.
Not 4 years ago, but it certainly did 10-20 years ago. They simply didn't exist back then.
And it's not a binary, either: just because there is one company mass-producing one does not mean the problem is resolved. We are talking about one of the most commonly produced objects in the world. Practically every single computer (bigger than a hand) that has ever been made has a traditional typewriter-style keyboard!
And the fact I (and many others) an willing to pay >$300 for one is clear evidence that the market for ergonomic keyboards is incredibly diluted. If I could buy a poor quality one for $30, I would do it in a heartbeat. The average traditional typewriter-style costs well under $1 to produce. Starting that kind of production scale would take a huge investment.
The fact that no one has tried once in the last 30 years to mass produce a cheap non-typewriter keyboard design is proof that conformity, and not convergence is the deciding factor.
> I would dare say that 99.99999% of keyboard users expect a similar layout.
Why don't they expect the best one? Seems like the 99.99999% of users are fooled by monkeys and bananas on ceiling experiment. I can not name that amount of people just idiots but if your upper-home row consist a word "typewriter" I consider your choice as definitely not wise.
Yes. Exactly as what we are having, no extra keys or extra something, we are talking about different placing of same keys so I surprised to see this question.
> Is 'best' compatible with what I learned without invested more time in learning something new?
Well, why (in ideal world) the kbd supplier has to consider the needs of not wise people? If you really have learned Qwerty you will not even noticed a different paint on the keys.
> Is 'best' something that's going to live far beyond it's usefulness based on it's cost?
It is best in the sense that the best side of knife for cutting bread is the sharp one but it is one of the worst ones for holding the knife.
> Is 'best' something you can't hand to someone else and have them use it?
Most people have spent their entire lives only seeing a few small deviations from the traditional typewriter shape.
That's what they had, so they developed themselves alongside it. It was hard work, and they don't want to do it again.
Not having to do the work of creating new muscle memory is a quality many people highly value.
Unfortunately for the rest of us, the assumption has been that there aren't enough people interested in trying something new to have a viable market. It would be a risky business venture: at the very least, difficult to raise venture capital. That is a self-filling prophecy: circular reasoning that demands conformity.
Thank you for your analogy. Demand shapes supply is a capitalism fairy tale. For most markets you just can't buy what you want. Even if you would be willing to pay 2 to 4 times. You have to buy the mass produced sameness. We do not choose what there is to buy. In 95% of products and shops the supply dictates the demand, often with a simulation of choice.
Look closely, for many applications there's only one or two products used nearly world wide. Often they are neither the best nor the cheapest. And don't get me started on the "choices" when it comes to smartphones.
>For most markets you just can't buy what you want. Even if you would be willing to pay 2 to 4 times.
This is a problem I see everywhere... People have no idea that mass production leads to order of magnitude reduction in costs or more.
In most products you buy today there is a 4X price range between low to high end products. When suddenly you're talking about 10-100X price range people go with why they can buy.
You'd think HNers would have a better idea on manufacturing costs.
> There is a key difference going from "convergence" to "conformity": circular reasoning.
> People who need to sell the thing they invent, tell themselves that "convergence" is the best way there. Customers like familiar traits. So they design for intentional convergence, and that is the essence of conformity.
This is completely tautological. You're just saying "it's not convergence, it's conformity" and your only argument is "because I say it is".
They're only the same if you're taking an extremely reductive approach to them... And at that point you could also say that "99.99999%%" of Smartphones are the same, wherever they're iPhones, Androids or windows from a dacades ago. They're all rectangular devices with a large screen and touch input after all.
And for the record, keyboards have massive size difference, in all dimensions. Keyboards actually have a way bigger variance then you'd find in phones.
Some are just a few mm high, others go as high as 5cm. There are 60% keyboards. Ergonomic keyboards.
Keyboards that're basically just a small nipple with which you're doing input by gesture.
the keys and actuation themselves are another topic with Rubberdome on cheap and trashy keyboards, mechanical with springs and other techniques, even some optical - though they're pretty gimmicky.
There are stylized key caps off all kinds, including some really cringe material like ahego keys from a few years ago. And actually quite pretty one's with mountains, clouds and areas stylized under resin [1]
Some are so small you can only use them with your thumbs
Keyboards don't inherently need to have the keys laid out like a typewriter. Most people are only willing to use a keyboard that is, because that is what they already developed their muscle memory for. That's the motivation behind the conformity I'm talking about.
A natural convergence would start with many competing options, and gradually boil down to what's popular; but keyboard shapes have only recently seen meaningful diversity be available at all.
I get where you're coming from and it'd definitely agree that the average keyboards has strongly converged on a standardized layout.
Nonetheless, there isn't a single layout. You got ANSI and ISO as the big branching standards with adjustments to bindings and added keys for various extra letters/modifiers depending on the localization.
And yes, i brought up the phone example to illustrate how they're only superficially the same. Your argument maps exactly onto phones after all, as they all have similar looks, input pattern etc.
> I get where you're coming from and it'd definitely agree that the average keyboards has strongly converged on a standardized layout.
They didn't converge: that was my whole point. They never diverged (significantly) from the original typewriter. All of the letter keys are in the same relative position.
Where to place function and return was a new question (the typewriter didn't have those), so naturally that aspect actually had variance until converging on a few standards.
Take one look at a dactyl, and you can see what I mean.
> The great mistake that this article makes is thinking that people need to be constantly expressing themselves in some unique way that nobody's ever done before. But the world has almost 8 billion people, few things are as unique as you think.
I'd like to riff on this.
People's attention is limited. People's capacity for novel stuff is limited. And things are bound to be commoditized.
But that's not necessarily a bad thing. Firefox is a tool that just works for me. It doesn't crash and delete my tabs when it visits a random web site. Sure, that's predictable.
But that frees up my attention to go elsewhere. To do /brand new/ stuff, not just mess around with web browsers.
If every airbnb looks the same, perhaps that's just because people get out of the airbnb to do the stuff they actually want to do?
Yep. I love that I don’t have to think about Car. Because I don’t care about Car. If I’m lucky enough to buy new Car then I _know_ Car will work great because we figured out Car.
Interiors, exteriors, etc… great. I’m glad there are building codes that make buildings safe, and that ugly poorly made furniture is kind of hard to find.
Convergence is a great word for this phenomenon. I’m glad humans tend to converge around good ideas; it’s gotten us far.
This article is ultimately a ramble with no strong purpose. Just like most internet articles. “Convergence.”
Isn't it great that you can converge on the things you don't care and specialize on the things you're interested in, like speccing and customizing your toothbrush.
Convergence is an interesting term, but in my eyes (as someone who both has worked as web and product designer) the reason it happens is not sales, but because looking the same as everyone else has some benefits:
- you can rely on existing/known design methodology and tools which takes less time and is cheaper to deliver results in
- it is the safe choice. The times were some manager would admit they have no idea about design and let designers do their job is a thing of the past. So they instead tell designers to do what $marketleader is doing. They use bootstrap? So do we now!
- this homogeneity has advantages as people know how certain buttons/controls look, but that middle-ground usability will not translate well to every application, because not every application is meant for that kind of middle ground usage. That is why industrial tools used 24/7 have different designs than a tool meant for people to be used once a year. The latter needs to priorize being self-explainatory above everything else, the former needs to priorize other things like productivity, covering special use cases, durability, reliability etc. If you used the UX principle of the latter on the former you end up with something that looks okay or simple to use, but is actively torture to use 24/7.
So me pet peeve with this kind of design is that some designers think it is the right hammer to squash every problem with (with the incentives laid out above), and that leads to suffering for users.
There is a reason why you and me are currently writing on this platform, and part of it is it's non-comforming design that isn't sleek or anything, but it serves the purpose better than any typical design would — because this site is not meant to be just that.
Another essay that I can't find anymore called it "expedience." As in, we all converge on the same products not because they are the best, but because they are "good enough"
You make a good point, but I think there's a qualifier that convergence in this case is convergence to mass-market appeal. Everything looks the same because that's the aesthetic that most appeals to ~75% of the population. What's missing is that there seems to be an increasing lack of alternative designs to appeal to the other ~25%.
I don't think "most appeals" is accurate. It's the aesthetic that results in the most profit, which just means that it's optimal in terms of making tradeoffs between level of appeal to various consumer segments, price points, cost to manufacture, etc.
But maximizing profit and the tradeoffs that result from that are definitely not equivalent to most appealing to the general population.
The link between sameness and mass-market capitalism is obvious to me. I was surprised by its absence in the article and comments here.
Alternative designs that cater to a fraction (25%) of the population will not have the full benefit of economies of scale, so emd up having higher prices and forced to position as up-market/luxury products - which imposes another set of constraints that also impose sameness (see optional packages for luxury SUVs.)
It's really hard for "quirky" products to succeed in the world we made as those products will be strangled by the free hand of the market.
I agree, "quirky" sometimes become mainstream: just as the Gentrification Aesthetic[1] - now popular on AirBnB as noted by the article used to be quirky. However, I meant products that stay quirky will not succeed on the mass market, almost by definition.
1. Bare brick, white walls prominently exposed reclaimed wood
The race to the bottom has taken a lot of brightness out of the world, its quite sad imo.
Anecdotally, my home town replaced a three way intersection with a nice roundabout and then put up a little art piece in the center of it. People complained to the heavens about a minor expenditure on an art installation when the money could have gone to, who knows, resurfacing a half block of sidewalk? Not everything needs to be so drab and utilitarian, yet despite the supposed massive output of the economy we've built, we must scrimp and pay bottom dollar for every last thing.
> almost universally considered nicer than today's buildings
I can't agree with that. They're a fascinating curiosity, but they're also awfully gaudy (no pun intended). The ornamentation is extremely excessive by the standards of any common style since. Not because of cost, but just because of taste.
Art nouveau can be seriously intimidating, some of the interiors seem genuinely frightening to live in.
Nonetheless, it was one of the last art movements with a true vision, and most importantly staying with the theme of the article, divorced from concerns of practically and unit economics. It's unlikely we ever see something similar arise.
I know some people are making the point that taste is subjective, but I'd like to argue that, at least in some aspects, certain designs are solvable. There may be an interesting period of variety while we solve something, but eventually, we can get there. I was taken aback while watching Something's Gotta Give recently. The movie is from 2003 and spends a lot of time in a nice house. Well, the kitchen looked perfect to me, 20 years later. If I could have an ideal kitchen, it would be that one. If you want back 30, 40, and 50 years and showed me an expensive kitchen, they would not appear "solved" in the same way.
I realize this may be just my personal taste, but I doubt that. Feedback would be welcome.
You might know already, but just to add on to it, director Nancy Meyers is (rightfully) admired for the impeccably designed homes in her movies https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/nancy-meyers-film-kitchens-... Jokey tone from the article aside, she nails that aspirational suburban rich people house.
Nice, yeah that looks great to me. Though the fridge looks counter-depth (I prefer a deeper fridge and dislike those disturbingly-shallow ones common in luxury homes). Proper spacing between the "islands" so two people (or more) can fit comfortably. It is indeed a very solid "solution" to the kitchen.
In the same sense, I felt like Macintosh System 7 was a complete and optimal solution to the computer "desktop" paradigm. There was never any compelling need to substantially change it (and indeed even the absolute latest Mac or Windows is nearly the same, though far less refined and concise IMO). I'm not sure when/if we'll see a drastic difference in the personal computer OS GUI that takes hold.
They did similar studies to determine the looks of an ideal romantic partner. The resulting look was very close to the average of all available romantic partners. However, that doesn't mean that individuals don't have different preferences. It is the same if you do a study of people's favourite colours. The average result will have little to do with people's personal preferences.
These designs are not people's preferred designs, just those that everyone least dislikes.
It's well known that symmetry is considered beauty, so when you average up enough imperfect faces, you'll get a symmetrical and thus beautiful average.
"Convergence" is only true when you use the average of a very narrow distribution. If you take a very complex and multi-dimensional topic like design, ask a bunch of people their opinions and use the average, at best they'll parrot back what they've "learned" is good, and at worst you end up with a product that doesn't embody the collective desires of the group but the ho-hum middle that doesn't satisfy or offend anyone.
>> Things don't need to be different just for the sake of being different. Because different can also be worse.
Different is worse for the majority and that's a good thing, because it can then be really, really good for a small subset. If we repeat this everyone can get something really good, and have things they really dislike. This is the world I want to live in, emphasis on the living part.
I also think they miss the point on AirBnb in that all those AirBnb's that have "brooklyn" style now is because it's a trend, and will need to be updated in 10 years for the next new trendy styling if they want to keep targeting those same global travelers. Ask anyone in the boutique/trendy hotel industry what their ROI is on their refreshed looks. (Might not be 10 years, but it's defintely less than 20)
This take is so wrong as it utterly discounts the affect of mass market brand advertising, a trillion dollar global industry. People's tastes haven't "Converged" they've been manipulated by corporations to be whatever is most profitable.
I don't think human society has ever evolved past what this article would describe as "average" at any point of its existence since recorded history began. Sure there were bursts of "creativity" and "diversity" at some points but they were usually just experimental prototypes that haven't yet been tested by market selection. Carcinisation is an example of this in nature.
Cars looking all the same isn't really a new thing. The illusion of variety in the 1980s-2000s era was just old cars not yet being phased out by regulation changes. Modern cars have far better function at everything than older cars while only an extremely small price on aesthetics was paid in exchange.
Real estate developers have converged on beige toned car oriented soulless tracts. Some people think they like that suburban style. Others loathe it and choose to live in walkable, vibrant urban areas.
I could go on for days, other than having the common taste that our five basic needs are met, there is tremendous diversity in what we actually prefer.
Averages are artificial concepts that fail in reality.
The issue for me is how marketing keeps selling the opposite. The way homogeneous things are constantly sold as a unique way to express your difference (go watch any car ad or any new condo poster) creates that dystopian feel.
This idea that there is a shared or converged sense of aesthetic or preference is really peculiar as it doesn’t match any of what I observe.
Convergence really seems to happen solely due to economics, particularly mass production combined with marketing to drive demand for those uniform items.
like the way the airline market converged on how they can charge people extra to be treated like humans. And charge extra to resolve arbitrary and clearly contrived annoying policies? That’s caused happier users?
Also calling an airline a market is kind of iffy in many ways. It's highly regulated to keep planes from falling out of the sky. I'm sure there are many airlines that would give you a lot more space if they got rid of the crews that ensured all the bolts weren't about to fall out of the plane.
You're right in that there is a convergence happening across everything, and I think it's a product of the increased pace of communication facilitated by the internet.
Whether this impending mono-culture is "better" or "worse" is really just a matter of values. Engineers, who evaluate things on how well they perform, might see the convergence as a good thing - the proliferation of winning designs. Designers and artists who see creation as having its own intrinsic value and variety being the spice of life will lament the trend.
> Sure, you can design electric toothbrush branding that "stands out", but it's probably going to result in less sales. Because most people don't want to express their unique personality via their electric toothbrush, they just want a nice slim white object that blends into their sink area.
I’d generally agree with you here but there are exceptions. The company ‘Liquid Death’ is yet another company selling water, but due to their branding and viral marketing have made drinking water seem ‘cool’.
Liquid Death is counter culture, deliberately rebelling against the status quo (and collecting a price premium for doing so). Even here they lean into conformity - their cans are shaped and styled like beer cans - partially for marketing and partially because that size of can was already made. The lettering on their cans leans into existing tropes about rebellious brands.
In one of my marketing classes I learned of 16 different archetypes brands mostly fall into. Usually all brands in a category use similar archetypes. You look at Liquid Death using an atypical archetype for the water category and see a unique clever choice. The author of this piece would probably decry that they use similar branding techniques to every other rebellious archetype brand.
It’s challenging but rewarding to buck category archetypes. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a niche for an aggressively branded toothbrush with an attitude problem.
It also falls into traps of statistics. The individual will have its own bunch of likes or dislike and overall the set of them will be pretty unique.
But when you add indiscriminate averaging, well, what article describes happen. What, did they think they find one nation that hates the outdoors enough that after averaging it wouldn't come on top ?
They essentially made design by committee in 11 countries and were surprise when result was mediocre
And the complaint about cars for example, frankly most people use them as an appliance and most people are not in position to throw away some MPG or convenience just because they want the lines on outside to be different. Frankly article does that part really badly as the car interiors differ quite a bit and that is what you will be looking at when you're using it for most of the time.
And you usually need to pay both money and convenience for "pretty" in cars. If you need to fit a family and also want it off the ground more, it will be bulbous SUV no matter what designer does with it, and it will look similar if you pick color that's worst at showing the difference and outright remove some stylistic elements like rim choice
I think the amount of sameness have more to do with mediocre designers copying the good ones rather than some kind of convergence of mediocrity. I think perfectly fine designs that appeal to wider audience just need to shy away from things most people dislike, not try to design by commitee what average person does, or see what some designs got famous for then try to copy it coz that's the fashion now.
Article point is that phenomena described are "negative" and that we should look for more expression.
I imagine life where on each step I have to deal with something I have never seen. That would be really tiring. I have my own venues to be creative, living in a world where everything is expression of someone else "creativity" would take all energy from me because I would have to work out too many thing every day.
And as some categories converge others change. Aesthetics can be dynamic. I thought this video recently was interesting discussing the way that modern computer animation became homogeneous to capture that "pixar" look – and subsequently how it's now changing with Into the Spiderverse.
The fallacy in your argument is the belief in the average human.
According to your argument, we should all buy the same shirt size, medium. Because that's the size that isn't too big or too small for the most people.
But people are different, and in a human-centered world, our products would be as unique and varied as we are, which is much more varied than you give us credit for.
> They've converged because we think they're nice.
There is no we when it comes to preference. I, and you, and everyone couldn't possibly care less about whether our toothbrush is a color or shape that pleases someone else. It's my toothbrush. The last thing in the world I want is it being used by any other human.
The idea of aggregate human desire does not exist in humans. We each only have our own personal desires, shared by no one. When I walk into Baskin-Robbins, I do not care what flavors of ice cream other people like.
Where aggregate demand exists is in corporations making products. Because they are trying to amortize their design and manufacturing costs across an ever larger number of consumers, they create the notion of average human preference as a target for their designs. But it's important to always remember that average preference is an invention of mass manufacturing.
It's soul-crushing to discredit your own desires simply because it's not cost effective for a company to cater to them.
The clear evidence against your argument is that products across the entire spectrum of human artifice used to be much more varied. I'm fairly certain Homo sapiens has not measurably evolved in the past hundred years or so. We are the same people we used to be, with the same passions and pecadillos.
What has changed is the economic and organizational structure of the groups creating the stuff we use. When you got your shirt for a local tailor who only made stuff for your city, it naturally sold shirts that made sense for your climate. The "average" it was targeting was a much smaller aggregate based on people whose lives are measurably more similar to yours.
But now that everything comes from a handful of transnational mega-corporations, shipping containers means any product can come from anywhere, and mobility means that everyone is from nowhere, products are trying to please all possible humans.
And the result is an alienating wash of forgettable products that tell us at every moment that we use them, "The people who made this only care 0.0000001% about you."
Yup, exactly. My comment was going to be "so what?"
Maybe it's globalism, maybe it's that deep down all humans are the same species and like the same things.
But a lot of these are millennial/zoomer aesthetics, generations who are now in their 30s/early 40s and coming of age/20s. The whole piece reads like a "millennials are killing uniqueness" spiel.
I feel like the author hasn't really covered the fact that things have been converging forever. It's like they're musing about the fact that so many Greek and Roman buildings have stone columns. Or that all 1950's soda bars all looked the same, no matter where you went. Or that all 1900s English factories all looked the same.
The point is that people have ALWAYS been converging on stuff, it's just now that we're more global and we have the Internet to connect us, of course we're seeing it happen regardless of proximity or borders.
What we must come to terms with is the fact that we are all inexorably drawn towards the realm of Plato's Forms, and this convergence is not something we can avoid or deny. It is not a matter of mere coincidence or happenstance, but rather an inherent feature of the world we inhabit. Regardless of our individual beliefs or perspectives, the Forms exert a profound influence on our experiences and perceptions, shaping the very fabric of our reality. Even those who reject Plato's philosophy cannot escape its grasp, for the Forms are embedded in the very structure of our existence. To say that we all experience convergence on Plato's Forms is to recognize the fundamental, undeniable role that the Platonic worldview plays in shaping our understanding of the world.
> all inexorably drawn towards the realm of Plato's Forms
I almost retched reading that. All the examples in the article are of the most bland, disposable junk imaginable. I think the common interpretation of Plato's ideals is one of an aspirational, idealized world, beyond our grasp. Seeing such perfection realized in mass produced crap is baffling to me.
Or, Plato's Forms are not what we would expect. Because humans are converging on something, and it doesn't fit 'someone's specific concept of ideal', doesn't mean it isn't converging to the Form. That is just arrogantly saying you have more of the 'ideal' in mind than anyone else. But nature can be ugly too, and that is potentially the true 'ideal'.
Meh, I don't buy it. Fashion is invisible except in hindsight. It's all just fashion, it's hairspray and shoulder pads and bell bottoms. Nobody actually wants to live in a house that looks like a laboratory, it's just the fad of our time. And it sells, so with the current environment of investment first home second, greater-fool-in-a-few-years home buying strategy, it makes sense to reinforce it.
It's the same thing with everything else. What it comes down to is risk aversion.
"Convergence" is just "copycatting". Aside from functional convergence, aesthetic convergence is just fashions, fads and copycats. We will all look back on this "optimize everything by removing the soul" as sterile, unimaginative and uninspiring.
> It used to be that artists and designers were still trying to figure out what looks good, and trying all the things. But now we've tried so many things and we've gotten better at zeroing in the precise aesthetics viewers and consumers want. We've converged.
Wow wow wow, stop right there. Consumers? Maybe. But viewers and the audience for art in general... that's stretching it.
Artists haven't zeroed in the precise aesthetics of anything. Sure, if your goal is to maximize sales, go for bland genericity; but if your goal is art, artists will be forever seeking because art is an eternal search.
This is not the "end of art", Fukuyama style, and this article proves nothing of the sort.
> What the article describes is correct, but I don't think the words "average" or "homogeneity" or "conformity" are the right terms, as they seem to carry negative connotations here.
But this is the essence of article, that the average has bad tastes when it comes to art.
Salvador Dali has way less exposure than some random Instagram influencer and Bach has way less exposure than some random hip hop "legend" from Brooklyn, NY. Some random people from Tik Tok have more exposure than Friedrich Nietzsche.
They've converged because manufacturers kowtow to the maximum likelihood sale, not because we think they're nice.
Of course, some people think they are nice. And yeah, maybe in a choice discrimination/maxDiff study, I would choose some of these converged styles over other styles, but not necessarily among all potential options.
Then, because manufacturing capacity is limited (whether we are manufacturing cars/spaces/aesthetics/ideas), the choice set that is actually available narrows.
The article says “averaging”, you say “converging”, but what if the operative verb is actually “optimizing”?
Certain looks get the most followers on Instagram. Movie posters are tested against focus groups. Market forces reward high end coffee shops that look a certain way. To me, the thread all of these have in common is optimization towards a certain goal.
And thus the sadness in our hearts is the feeling that aesthetics has been subsumed as yet another optimization problem.
Absolutely not. Variety is the spice of life, uniqueness is what gives it its verve and essence. The sameness of everything everywhere is absolutely suffocating.
I have long argued that we humans are obsessed with data when we shouldn't be. Intuition, taste, and artistry create the variety that gives everything character, and we systematically and violently beat it out through endless focus-group testing and lowest-common-denominator sterilization.
I think convergence is also not quite right because you're not _exactly_ describing a mono-culture. Several different designs might be popular and good. Instead, we're at an age where everything is hyper-tuned.
Its an age of wonder not average, but with that comes the fact that its harder to build a better mouse trap. Popular things can have design input from millions (and billions if you count something like a Facebook feed).
> The great mistake that this article makes is thinking that people need to be constantly expressing themselves in some unique way that nobody's ever done before. But the world has almost 8 billion people, few things are as unique as you think.
I think you got it wrong. We shouldn't express different and we needn't to as ordinary people.
But as creatives, as creators originality it's what should define us.
> Can't we just enjoy having nice things? Even if those things have converged aesthetically? They've converged because we think they're nice.
But just because aesthetics have "converged" doesn't mean that everyone finds them pleasing. There's quite a lot of those converged aesthetics that I find unpleasant.
Things only exist if they are made. The ubiquity of this convergence then implies that those who make have similar tastes and those who have dissimilar tastes lack some fundamental capacity to construct.
I think it implies that the "convergence" is toward the lowest common denominator. That is, a design that avoids displeasing most people rather than pleasing most people.
It's a cost-savings measure. It also is, I think, a large reason why the modern world tends to lack aesthetic excellence.
> Can't we just enjoy having nice things? Even if those things have converged aesthetically? They've converged because we think they're nice.
While convergence sounds like a good thing for an electric toothbrush, it's a terrible concept for art and culture, and even for consumer goods I'm afraid it's going to stifle innovation.
Lots of people before have claimed there is a "perfect" or "final" aesthetic that is discoverable through science. They've all been surprised 20 or 30 years later when people started liking different things.
I cringe at this idea, and especially when it comes to human distinction. I see what the "media" (advertising) portrays as a beautiful human body. I look at the people around me. Not the same.
The issue, with this phenomenon, is that it tend to lead to local maximum, preventing the exploration of anything else that could be as good or better.
Part of the problem within this article is the choice of pictures. The first section states, “In nearly every country all people really wanted was a landscape with a few figures around, animals in the foreground, mainly blue.” They then present 9 pictures that reinforce the concept that people all around the world expect the _same_ thing. But that's simply not true.
They didn't take that description and give it to artists all around the world to paint. "Komar and Melamid then set about painting a piece that reflected the results."
So _they_ painted pictures that were essentially the same, reinforcing their own point. The rest of the article selects pictures reinforcing the same point.
As user nassimm pointed out, you only need to walk down the street and look around to see the differences. Travel a little and you'll see the differences everywhere.
People may want similar things, but the actualization of that is different everywhere.
I figured people were going to take issue with the opening anecdote about art, but that was simply the author trying to frame the story in an interesting way. The rest of the article was more compelling.
The ubiquity of the 5-over-1 architecture in the US is very striking. The NY Times had an article recently called "America the Bland" [1] which challenged people to tell if apartments were in Nashville, Seattle or Denver. All I could think looking through it was "These look exactly like all the apartments near me in Boston and Cambridge.
5 over 1 is the result of regulations of various kinds converging resulting in economic pressures dictating that building format.
Also unless land is just atrociously expensive, the marginal cost of adding floors doesn't go down. In fact it really goes up at some point. I've still never actually worked out how sewage works in supertall buildings.
Freshwater, sewage, fire codes, elevators, foundations, load-bearing structures, HVAC all get more difficult as you add more floors (beyond some small number around 4 where it's all pretty trivial).
Another advantage 5-over-1s have (which the NYT article also mentions) is that they are cheap and easy to build. Very tolerant to cheap building materials, lots of prefabricated parts, lots of contractors who are familiar with how to build them. And because there's more demand then supply and people mostly pay based on location there's little incentive to do something more expensive
It's not the format that I'm referring to but the style.
The dominant architectural style of them includes:
- Multiple boxes merged into each other at different heights and depths
- Multiple (2-3) siding materials used in a regular pattern, such as vinyl slats + brick, or smooth aluminum + brick + cement.
- Multiple colors used in a regular pattern, usually white + gray + bright-primary-color. Primary color is used in small rectangular splashes, usually below or beside alternate windows
The basic look is that of many shipping containers nestled into each other.
That's also caused by design reviews and regulation that require "breaking up massing". So you get boxes jutting out and a mishmash of cladding materials.
My biggest gripe with 5 over 1's is the interior and the pricing. They're all cheap drywall with no insulation, quartz counter tops with an island and stainless steel appliances, and vinyl, wood grain flooring. They then claim that because they hit all of the "luxury" points, they are "luxury" apartments and can charge an extra $750 more than other apartments. In the end, all new apartments are like this, and beside location, basically interchangeable.
They're marketed as "luxury" because it's so hard to build new housing in the US. The luxury you're paying for is new construction. You're not going to get competition on materials used in housing until it becomes easy to compete on housing.
Kind of weird that you are calling out drywall here, what other building material makes sense for interior walls? And when you say no insulation do you mean in the interior for sound proofing? Exterior walls certainly have and require adequate insulation to be to code.
And those economic pressures include: at 5 floors, you can stickbuild the structure with relatively unskilled labor. External skins can make them look relatively different, but a single concrete floor with stores, and a structure that wraps around and hides the parking structure is, pragmatically, easy and cheap to build.
Try dropping a baseball from the 75th floor of a building and watch how hard it hits the ground. You can't just have a sewage vertical going up that high.
Sewage is far more difficult to handle than water.
You need to maintain a continuous downward slope. You are very limited in how you can have bends in pipes or two pipes join each other. You need to make sure air can get in and out of every point of the pipes, otherwise differences in air pressure will make things get stuck inside.
With pressurized water it just gets pushed wherever you route the pipes and you don't need to worry about the exact route nearly as much. Yeah, you need pumps to get the appropriate pressure on higher floors, but it's still simpler than sewage.
It's not quite that simple. If you've ever lived in a tall building and heard/seen/smelled stories of sewer pipes backing up, well you'll know what I mean. The bottom floor of a 50 storey building needs much more sewage space than the bottom floor of a 5 storey building. Anyway, there are considerations about venting, as well as increased capacity for lower floors versus higher floors, and the whole thing has to be designed in conjunction with the rest of the plumbing anyway.
> I figured people were going to take issue with the opening anecdote about art, but that was simply the author trying to frame the story in an interesting way. The rest of the article was more compelling.
I don't disagree, but this is simply bad rhetoric. Don't start with an incorrect/misleading/confusing example, and then expect readers to stick with you for the more compelling stuff.
All housing waves produce cookie-cutter housing. Victorians all look like other Victorians, dingbats look like other dingbats, and brownstones look like other brownstones.
Yep. This article is a good example of how to not do science. Not a single counterexample is provided from another decade. Not to even talk about actually trying to prove the same point for the 50's etc, with pictures.
> Before long, the designer had stumbled on the perfect research tool: AirBnB. From the comfort of her home the app gave her a window into thousands of others. She could travel the world, and view hundreds of rooms, without leaving her chair.
AirBnB the perfect research tool for interior inspiration? Well, it is if you wish to cherry pick for the specific topic of things looking the same.
It's indeed unsurprising that if you look at the designs produced to match a specific context (AirBnB) you'll get a good amount of uniformity, as sellers converge on efficient solutions. If you looked in other contexts (high end apartments for sale in major city, cheap new builds in small towns, mass produced single family homes in another country) you might end up finding more differences.
I would probably look at listings of new apartments in various parts of the world to get picture what is common and what is not. And this should be matched to similar segments(low, mid and high income) in each location.
And even that is fraught with problems, because in my neck of the woods (Germany) we generally do not buy houses/appartments furnished (and renting appartments furnished is also an exception and not the norm. Even kitchens are empty rooms without cabinets and appliances.).
Edit: Even though the AirB'n'B methodology is not perfect, I agree with some of the conclusions. Just like radio/tv has smoothed out local accents and dialects within a country, the internet produces global trends. This is not all bad.
That is bassically the same here (usa), although we typically include major appliances and cabinets.
However, when houses are put up for sale, they are typically "staged", where the seller will rent furnishings to make it look more homely.
Apartments are more hit and miss. The bigger complexes will often have a show apartment they keep furnished for toors, and may often used a furnished one for their pictures.
Obviously the way you furnish a house for show is not the same way you would to live in it. But it seems like a reasonable approximation of the 'average' sensabilities of the market.
Nobody can afford to furnish an apartment the way big complexes stage their model. They rent good-looking but useless furniture from some place like Rent-a-Center. They can afford the rent on it (they pay for it pre-tax, while actual people have to pay for it post-tax) but its such shoddy quality that it will fall apart as soon as you use it. I've never seen anyone decorate their apartment like this. Even AirBnB hosts quickly find out that they can plaster cheap glittery decorative tchotchkes everywhere but the bed and couch need to be something that won't fall apart if you look at it wrong.
That would definitely be better, although you're still only capturing part of what's available, or at least a biased sample of what's available. Different form factors come onto the market at different rates - some may never be on the market, or not in an easily accessible manner (sold locally, or via word of mouth, or via private auction etc). I think perhaps that's a distinction that the article fails to make, it's easier than ever to access goods and services from all over the world, but that ease also favours mass market products. If you put as much effort into doing whatever you're trying to do as someone would have pre-internet, you probably have access to at least as much variety as they did.
The article is still not wrong though, despite how you try to science it. Everywhere I look it's too much of the same shit: the instagram clone army of injected lips and fake eyelashes, the same craft ipa on every shelf, the same song released by someone with $$$ lil and x in their name, the same superhero movie with people being thrown through buildings, the same "our food is natural" burger chain.
No it’s not and stop trying to be smarter by saying it’s always been this way.
Go look at art of different societies from as near as 150 years ago. Spanish, French, English, and American fashion, architecture, and style are wildly different compared to the sea of homeginity of today.
I am tired of hacker news for always having these shallow “smarter than you” sage comments that completely miss the point. It’s just like the article pointed out. At scale here everyone’s comment is “no you’re wrong because [some mundane detail observation that misses the point].” It’s like engineer cognitive scale Markov chain.
I think he means globalization. All those cultures were probably homogeneous to some extent in their own isolated bubbles. The thing that changed was near-instant global communication. When most people in each society had full visibility into the standards/cultures of other societies, their definitions of an ideal society converged based on the new information.
> I am tired of hacker news for always having these shallow “smarter than you” sage comments that completely miss the point. It’s just like the article pointed out. At scale here everyone’s comment is “no you’re wrong because [some mundane detail observation that misses the point].”
Nitpicking mundane (and unimportant) details is HN Commentary In a Nutshell. I totally expected these comments and did not come away disappointed. We make an art out of missing the forest for the trees here!
It sucks, too, because the article makes a great point with numerous examples, but all we have here are comments like "Well, ackshually, in paragraph 5 sentence 3, the author says 'all' when he meant 'most' so the entire article is clearly wrong!" which completely miss the point.
> Go look at art of different societies from as near as 150 years ago
Precisely.
150 years ago, countries lived in their own cultural bubble because communication was much slower and mostly limited to local information. Or look at ancient societies which had their own homogenous culture compared to other cultures (eg: Ancient Greece vs Aztecs).
I think it's fair to say that today with globalization and the internet, we're really getting into what McLuhan denominated the global village. Instagram is a good example of this.
To add to that, the author completely ignores the fact that the differences from one person to the next might be much more significant than averaged differences inherited from their country's culture.
The author seems to be experiencing a case of what's known as Baader–Meinhof phenomenon.
There may be such thing as the AirSpace look, but this may be driven by cost cutting more than actual style.
Exposed brick, exposed air ducts, reclaimed wood, brass plumbing pipe lamps with Edison bulbs...
All this is DIY stuff you do when you want to keep your expenses at the minimum while making the place look nice, and it accomplishes that very well, if donde right, I think.
But I bet most people would go with a $50K custom Italian kitchen instead of exposed shelves if they could afford it.
I don't agree on the cost cutting argument: preparing a wall of exposed brick is certainly more expensive than simply slapping another coat of paint onto it, industrial artefacts of the past have become sought after items and are selling at good prices, and what has once been available as barely designed, locally produced base-line products is now selling as designer items.
I'd argue, the element of cultural alignment to the universally accepted is predominant, regardless of the price.
(As often, the simple, DIY-style, apparently cheap, is actually more costly. As a fancy example, once VW/Audi sold the same platform twice, once as the more elaborate Audi 80, once as the more base-line, economic VW Passat. Both variants shared the same dashboard with minor variations: the Audi came with sleek control lights behind a smooth cover, whereas the Passat exhibited its economic appeal by a group of bare lamps in the cavities of a basic, moulded plastic base board. However, the Audi dashboard was considerably cheeper to produce, with just a printed sheet of plastic snapping onto the mounts, while the economic appeal of the Passat afforded lights of varying color and a complex moulding of the plastic inlays.)
Economic convergence is actually one of the themes in the article. It's possible that much of aesthetic uniqueness stemmed/stems from being in an economically inefficient situation, where you don't know or don't have access to the solution that's "globally optimal" in some sense.
Many things can be crushed by efficiency. If every work and business has to solve some inefficiency (which seems to be true even in a communist-type system), in an optimal world you starve to death.
Still, there are many ways to use reclaimed and used stuff that won't look Instagrammy.
They also are comparing like with like and no surprise it looks similar. Big cities converge.
I’m originally from Tucson, and the aesthetic of the non-downtown area is quite unique. Adobe houses painted in desert tones, for example, are very different to east coast wooden houses.
It would be easy to parody this article by picking out photos of jungles from a distance. They all look the same! Or deserts. Or Mediterranean landscapes compared to Northern California. Snowy mountains - they’re all the same!
Even some elements of culturejamming approaches boring uniformity: Adbusters doesn't interest me because they're often a reaction to mass media and rarely present anything different or poetically-viral.
I wouldn't lump Banksy full-in on pure anti-corporate, anti-consumerist culturejamming because of the insightful socio-political commentary performance/works rather than trying to sell zines about how capitalism is bad.
> It's natural to feel that way sometimes, but the perception that everything and everyone looks the same is likely more a result of the ubiquity of certain trends and designs, rather than an actual lack of diversity. We live in a globalized world where information, ideas, and styles are shared quickly and easily, leading to the widespread adoption of popular trends. This can create a sense of uniformity in various aspects of life, from architecture to fashion.
> However, it is important to remember that despite the prevalence of certain trends, there is still a great deal of diversity in the world. This diversity can be seen in regional variations of architecture, local customs and traditions, and the unique personalities and experiences of individuals.
> It's also worth considering the role of technology and social media in shaping our perception of the world. Platforms like Instagram and Pinterest tend to promote a curated, idealized version of reality, often featuring similar aesthetic styles. This can contribute to the feeling that everything looks the same, even if that's not the case in reality.
> To better appreciate the diversity that does exist, try to explore different cultures, visit local events, or engage in conversations with people from different backgrounds. By actively seeking out and appreciating the variety that exists in the world, you may find that your perception of "average" begins to change.
I'm always wary of articles like this. The feeling of things becoming mediocre strongly resonates with me, but I am aware that there could be a great many different biases at play.
When I was younger, entertainment media felt magical. The complexity and depth of experiences I could get from even a second-rate story was immense. I remember staying up late at night to process the last movie I watched, or feeling that rich combination of sadness and inspiration from finishing a long book.
I barely consume media nowadays, because every book, movie, TV show, video game and song fails to give me an interesting or meaningful experience. They all feel like grey slop - and after a few minutes, I start to fantasize about vacuuming my apartment, because even that seems like an adventure in comparison.
The question is, why do I feel this way? Is it because the modern entertainment industry truly has become stale, or is it because I've lived long enough to see the simple patterns underlying most of our desires and fantasies?
> I barely consume media nowadays, because every book, movie, TV show, video game and song fails to give me an interesting or meaningful experience.
I felt this way too until I realized that what I was really experiencing was that my desire to explore outside of my comfort zone had lessened with age.
Have you jumped into silent films? Buster Keaton?
Have you explored European Atmospheric Cinema? Jean-Luc Godard?
Art House? Non-Kurosawa Japanese films? Pre-Bollywood Indian films?
In the past, when confronted with questions like that, I would reply with a statement akin to: "Yeah, but that's not what interests me!"
And the lesson I needed to learn about myself was contained within those— my own —words.
Thank you for this advice. Upon some self-reflection, I think I realize now that I've fallen into this exact trap. The few movies I've recently watched have been the kind of formulaic drivel that I know I'm sick of, and yet I've never felt any desire to watch genres I'm not already familiar with.
I seem to get some perverse kind of satisfaction from reinforcing my nihilistic view of the current state of things while doing absolutely nothing to challenge or improve that perception - and all the while I'm longing for some nostalgic idea of the past.
I've examined similar feelings very closely and don't believe it to be a past centric nostalgia. I've found niches that give me that same energy. Most of what I enjoy lies outside of what's recommended to me by most front page/news feed algorithms/is stuff I find as a consequence of deliberate search/spelunking for different novel ideas.
I genuinely believe true creativity taps into something beyond our conscious experience, and is a kind of strange combination between premonition and expression of the collective unconscious. I think our systems and machine centric world is delusional about the ability to statistically predict how to deliver what people actually want/need, and those systems are unable to replicate extremely important hidden benefits of human curation. We've created systems that seem to be able to meet our needs "automatically", but they don't actually meet our needs/they're too self referential and too reliant on explicit metrics. Those systems have taken over most of the more natural avenues for discovery and end up over-selecting for things that are the average of existing material, and have little creative authenticity. AI recommended and generated movies/art is the final boss of this trend.
That trap is a consequence of the dopaminergic treadmills most of us are stuck on courtesy of recommendation algorithms optimizing purely for attention.
Part of this phenomenon is that the traditional "curators" of art are not really doing their jobs as stewards of the art. They are just extracting money. You used to be able to find cinemas that showed art house films in places other than the center of big cities (where they are struggling to stay open), but now it's all Marvel movies and whatever new samey rom-com just came out. That leads people to not even start down the path of discovery to find what they really like.
The age of curation and stewarding is gone. You can find all sorts of new, boundary-pushing art online, but there's no money or respect in curation anymore. Media is being created faster than any curator can keep up and the market is so wide that it's easier for individuals to just ask friends instead of seeking a trusted curator.
Harold Lloyd Safety Last is a comedy silent film that I sat with 2000 other people to watch about a decade ago. There was an orchestra in the pit playing the music that was composed for the film. Talk about laughing until you cried. Magic evening.
Nitin Sawhney has written and performed new music for silent movies from India and Japan. Again performed to full concert halls producing quite a novel experience. A throw of the dice was quite something.
Philip Jeck and Gavin Bryars' The Sinking of the Titanic played with a small 1917 style dance band. Projected visuals cut from contemporary newsreel film of huge ocean liners and crowds playing against Jeck's turntable based improvisations. A magic and elegiac evening.
Don't overlook diminishing returns when examining this.
The first time you try skydiving it is likely to be quite the exhilaration. If you grew up doing with your parents and have jumped hundreds of times it's not going to be the same thing. But if you realised that and "discovered" reading novels for pleasure at your age that might give you an incredible buzz, your first of that kind.
No story is going to match a loved family member opening a book at your bedside when you were a child and intoning "Once upon a time..." Yet we chase that feeling forever, which is fine. I know grown adults who still immerse themselves in a childhood artistic experience from a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. It seems it captured the imagination of vastly fewer who were adults in 1978 and that doesn't mean they were curmudgeonly.
This why I find the geek-o-sphere so tiring dissecting things like why are the new Star Wars movies bad… I have no problem believing that… the old ones might have been better, but they were also formulaic and badly acted and the reason they seemed so profound and amazing at the time was seeing them as a kid! Those spending time watching and hating on kids movies might better seek out something that can actually challenge them.
>Is it because the modern entertainment industry truly has become stale, or is it because I've lived long enough to see the simple patterns underlying most of our desires and fantasies?
Most likely the latter. There's so much content being created nowadays thanks to advancements in pretty much everything, making it easier to for anyone to create content. Patterns eventually emerge since creating truly original and unqiue ideas is not compatible with the current rate of content creation.
The latter probably, but you could also say that means your standards have evolved, and it’s less easy to find material that challenges you. I tend to think it’s out there though, so I wouldn’t give up just yet! Our desires might be simple, but art does not need to deal with it in a simple or formulaic way.
Yeah I agree. Part of growing up is recognising patterns everywhere, including art. I don't doubt the process of making everything more average is there, but it's hard to ascertain that when every observer is biased.
> every book, movie, TV show, video game and song fails to give me an interesting or meaningful experience
I'm curious, have you tried watching shows like Russian Doll? Andor? The Last of Us? The Leftovers?
These are shows that deal with the very deepest of human themes -- growth overcoming trauma, political radicalization, paradoxical aspects of love, and finding meaning in life (respectively, for those four shows).
They're some of the most exciting and well-written pieces of art to come around in a long time. And then after each episode, you can easily spend a couple of hours reading story analysis and criticism, listening to podcast analysis and so forth. Because there is a lot to unpack -- the patterns there aren't simple at all.
I can't help but wonder if you're not finding things like these that are actually pushing the envelope. (Obviously we're not talking about things like the NBC reboot of Night Court.)
Except it is. You see it in the gp being flagged to death. Nothing is allowed to offend anyone anymore which means the only acceptable content is bland.
> The effects of the rise of "political correctness", hypersensitivity, and "cancel culture" over the last three or so decades should be considered, too.
There are countless books, movies, and songs from before the rise of these concepts that OP has almost certainly not consumed. Presumably OP wasn't just talking about new media, but rather all media, and therefore is probably a them issue and not a media issue.
Existing works, even those considered to be classics by many readers, and written by authors who passed away decades ago, can be affected by this sort of "sanitization" well after the fact.
Pretty ironic that your original comment got flagged to death - a great example of how only approved thoughts are let through the filter. It's really no surprise to me that things are getting blander when nothing is allowed to offend anyone anymore.
This seems somewhat cherry picked, and lacking real insight.
Sure we can agree on the obvious conclusions that mass production is going to try for mass appeal and thus “saminess”.
But my house certainly isn’t white with wood tones. That’s because I’ve been putting in the work to select and restore beautiful furniture from decades past and gradually building towards a more unique aesthetic.
Let me tell you it is expensive in both time and money.
- Just selecting a non-neutral wall color is very difficult and pretty much locks you into certain furniture.
- If you want to commission the perfect dining room table it will cost you $5-20k easily depending on your tastes. Or it will cost weeks of labor to DIY (assuming you’ve already devolved the prereq skills). Mass produced pieces will be your only option.
- For architecture, you don’t really get a choice. Custom building a home is hugely expensive and you’ll need a huge amount of skill/stress capacity to GC it yourself or pay $$$ for someone with a reputation.
I guess I don’t get the point of articles like this. I don’t think they’re entirely wrong, but I’m also pretty sure it’s always been like this. You don’t just get beautiful and unique things for free. It’s just when we look back on history we’re usually blinded by survivorship bias of the beauty that has stood the test of time.
Look up some of Brent Hull’s content about historical architecture. You’ll see that even though he rags on modern buildings, he’ll describe how the different architectural forms were massively influenced by the industrial capabilities of the time.
> I don’t think they’re entirely wrong, but I’m also pretty sure it’s always been like this.
It hasn't always been like that, if you put down the US-centric lens. Every shopping mall in a bigger city anywhere in the world now looks similar to a US shopping mall. Fast-food venues across the world resemble US venues, even if it's not a franchise under a US brand. It's a cultural hegemony that is exported through consumer products.
It used to be that every region had its own distinctive "malls" with mostly locally-made products, and now the whole world is stuck with Chinese-made products tuned primarily for the US taste.
Because you all buy from the same factory. This is where everything in the world is heading to because of cheap shipping.
Make shipping 100x the cost and this disappears.
The only reason the US 'won' here is after WWII we had relatively high pay and transported a lot of goods. As shipping got faster and cheaper it expanded beyond the US and took over the world.
The whole article is basically expanding a Twitter meme which stems entirely from cherry picking.
One of my favourite coffee table books is Designed in the USSR: 1950–1989. Pretty much everything in the book could easily rival or even triumph over Western designers of the same era, but the vast majority of the industrial designs shown never made it beyond the prototype stage. They looked like nightmares for mass production and it was hard to perceive a meaningful demand for them even in a market economy. These were made by Design Bureaus staffed with people whose sole job is to design things. It would be unfair to compare their work with products that have stood through the tests of user demand over time.
1. The author's entire brand identity follows this format. ("Hi. I'm Alex Murrell. I'm the Strategy Director at Epoch. And I make the complex clear.")
2. This is not a new observation. Apart from the articles he linked to, this is an old conversation, especially among urbanists. Already in the early twentieth century, Frankfurt School critical theorists were worried about the commodification of cities, with buildings becoming as ephemeral as consumer goods. More recently, Paul Connerton described modern space as "space wiped clean."
3. I know the author works in marketing, but I find the conclusion that "bold brands and courageous companies have the chance to chart a different course. To be different, distinctive and disruptive" shockingly bland.
I know everyone in comments is griping about selection bias. Sure. There are local differences in commercial establishments, and you'd have to be deliberately dense to deny that. But I also think you have to be willfully blind to not see the convergence in international design trends, which are an obvious consequence of globalization. There are some obvious reasons for this, particularly when it comes to architecture. Lots of these firms are multinational, and homogeneity is an artifact of efficiency. This is not necessarily a bad thing: as someone in an HCOL city, I would happily take "bland" buildings if it meant affordable housing.
The author is the strategy director at the same type of shockingly bland company that would have this website: https://www.epochdesign.co.uk/
All of the pages contain a vague paragraph with the invitation to "drop us a line" for actual information.
I don't think a blog post has to have a brand new thesis-- that's setting the bar a little high, but it should at least have some unique insight.
Talking about the convergence of global brands in the digital space and how that affects the physical spaces we occupy would have been really interesting way of framing trends. Especially regarding how a brand can stand out in a homogeneous world that seems to favor the known. But what do I know?
Fair point on a unique insight being sufficient for a blog post. I should also give the author credit for writing clearly and for his photo montages--problems with the approach aside, it's at least superficially effective.
This is a bit of a tangent, but I strongly suspect the design trend will swing toward hoarder chic. Almost 10 years ago now, I drove from Austin to San Antonio to buy an old stereo for $50. The owner's house was fascinating. He had two large rooms full of stereo equipment that he collected but had little interest in selling. Every item had a story: where got it, what a deal it was, what he traded for it. The stories evoked different times and places in his life. There was a whole biography there, in stereo(s).
Unless a café were really driven by the personality of its owner, it would be hard to reproduce that kind of thing in any meaningful way. But I think designers will at least try. We're obsessed with old things as indices of authenticity, and as the aesthetic pendulum swings, interior designers will differentiate themselves by making spaces marked by superfluity. This kind of thing already exists, of course--largely in bars filled with vintage stuff. In homes, something like it gets called "grandmillenial" or "grandma chic." But it'll ultimately be just as vapid as contemporary design language, because it'll be a simulacrum of something more authentic.
My sister-in-law is a successful interior designer, and her house is the epitome of AirSpace. It is as ephemeral as the Airbnb guest, changing every few months in the name of perennial "updates." It is the most heartless home I've ever been in.
Sure, these types of critiques have been around since the Frankfurt School, but I think that just shows how ahead of their time the members of the FS were. Adorno gets criticized for painting with too broad a brush, but I feel like he was just making the right points too soon. For example, his remarks on the film industry make perfect sense in the context of contemporary superhero movie trends, even though they might have been exaggerated at the time. And clearly the message hasn't gotten through.
On your last point, are the hideous 5-over-1s being built in your HCOL city affordable? Because the ones I'm seeing certainly aren't. Ugly, undistinguished, cheaply built, and still expensive!
if those apartments were $1000/mo for the quality of construction, you pay an extra $1500/mo on top for the surplus enjoyment of living the lifestyle which is intrinsically instagrammable.
So on the first example, I wouldn't be surprised if regular people everywhere had somewhat similar tastes and can't see why it would be a bad thing. Aesthetics diverge because of artistic cultures. If you're not a part of an "in" crowd, well, there's no reason why you'd be clued into what idiosyncratic things to like. Breaking out of isolated villages is actually a great thing of modernity, if you have any practical idea of premodern life. I prefer not to be locked into life of my rural grandparents, no matter how "authentic" it could be.
For the mass culture part, skepticism of most of the comments here does feel cheap. It's not that you aren't allowed to think about the world without properly hacking your p-values and pinky promise double blind peer review by your bros.
I think there's some merit to the feeling we are living in times of neo-midcentury rampant social conformity and anxiety to fit in, or else. A big part of this, I think, is economic anxiety that one has to conform to biologically survive in an unstable world and not be left alone. Though from my experience one can still escape much of it by dissociating from the terminally online algorithmic mainstream. Numerically most (?) of people don't care about it that much. It's good not to care about mainstream acceptance for yourself and your stuff, which is of course harder to do if you are an advertising person.
Let's hope these will be kinds of problems we'll care about in 10-15 years.
We are fed with ocean of information, the same bundle of information, with historical speed. If you are looking for e.g. interior design ideas, SEO, instagram, twitter, or whatever search channel du jour, including LLM, dictates what you are going to read.
We are also living in the most globalized era, having access to products unmatched in our history, the same bunch of products. Don't remember which book I read from, our supermarkets have more product, but all supermarkets are having the same kind of products.
Our working culture is also getting more homogenized. All companies are sharing the same kind of corporate talks. Everyone is taking the same style of profile picture, smiling, beaming with positive energy, with a uniform background colour. Think for example, your company tells you the company is cutting cost, what do you think the action will be? Why is that?
Software engineering is about using latest hot tech, not so much about understanding problems.
>having access to products unmatched in our history, the same bunch of products
Paradox of Choice.
Lets say you have access to 100 items, you'd probably want more in your life. Having 101 items would likely give a great improvement to your life.
Now image you have access to 1,000,000 items. Having access to 1,000,001 items isn't probable to change your life in any particular fashion. In fact each additional item you have to track is a mental burden. More work for you to figure out if its actually worse or better. Now bounce up this item to 10s of millions. Yea, life actually might get worse in this scenario.
Most comments lean onto the unscientific results about fashion and design, which follows fashion. But the article also displays one categorie that should be independent of fashion and solely rely on creativity: media.
This chapter proves the premise with statistics about film grossing and the increasing unoriginality that influences movie plots. When I was a teenager or years 20 to 30, I went to the cinema up to a dozen times per year. Almost no matter what genre, there was always an interesting movie with a fresh plot or story background. But since 2010 I visited less and less, and (also pandemic-related) the last movie I watched in the cinema is from 2018. But also at home I got the feeling there were less interesting movies. I thought maybe I am getting old. But these statistics tell me, this is not a feeling, it’s a machinery of permanent repetition without being creative AT ALL. And why is that? Because people still watch these repetitions and seems to not get tired of them.
Yes, I watched the phenomenal 22-movies-Marvel-universe with a great finale. These are of course part of the repetition statistic, but it was a new idea at the time, and Marvel clearly went to the success lane with this movie-spanning story. But now? Story’s over, they still produce new mediocre (but still visually pleasing) action movies which do not have any hint of a new spanning plot, and people STILL go watching them and create giant revenues. If people just would boycott any one of these movies, the financial desaster (200+ million dollars of cost per movie!) would end this at once.
So … is it a problem of the society that they expand fashion also to creative things and seem to be happy with any different-but-same movie? I am tired of these movies, I am also tired of TV/streaming series with the same plots again and again. There is more film material produced than ever but for me there is much less to watch than say from 20 to five years ago.
> But also at home I got the feeling there were less interesting movies.
I manage maybe 30-35 new movies per year (and usually pick up a few more from that year by about two years out from its end) and I'd say a solid 80% don't suck, and about half are pretty damn good. Usually there are another ten or so that I know about and wanted to watch but never get to, and there are surely a bunch more good ones that I miss entirely. 2021 was a bit of an exception because Covid fucked with productions quite a bit and made the movie scene that year kinda weird (though there were several really good small-cast-small-crew films released that year!) but otherwise, consistently, there are roughly mid-tens of good movies released every year, not even counting local indie scene stuff.
Now, assessing it this way does require 1) looking at more than just what's heavily advertised, and 2) having pretty broad taste in genres and being willing to meet a movie where it is, and at least having the capacity to enjoy what it's trying to do assuming it pulls it off reasonably well—me, I'd say Beyond the Black Rainbow and Guardians of the Galaxy and One Cut of the Dead and Logan Lucky are all good movies, so... I'm capable of enjoying most genres and both "high" and "low" art, so the set of films that I might like is pretty large, which helps a lot.
I don't see any novel TV. The last truly novel TV format was probably the different reality TV formats which exploded 20 years ago and kind of took over everything. Netflix which has dropped billions of dollars on TV basically decided to just copy every format which was successful on cable TV, and has invented nothing novel as far as I can tell except for the interactive TV specials (https://help.netflix.com/en/node/62526) which didn't really seem to take off.
If you expand TV to include youtube and other streaming services, in a sense we're in an age of unprecedented choice.
You want to watch someone building a robot? Or building a sailboat from scratch? Smelting iron in a furnace they built themselves out of clay? Blacksmithing? Welding? Reviewing PC-98 Visual Novels? Taking apart LED lights? Picking locks? Shooting antique firearms? Using a tatoo-removing laser on themselves? Restoring classic cars? Fitting powerful rally car engines into classic cars?
We've got all of those, completely free and available on demand.
Back when there were only 4 TV channels, content had to have much wider appeal - requiring both mainstream topics, and keeping things simple enough to be accessible to almost anyone.
Great point! But even those services seem to have stagnated after an explosion in their growth phase maybe 10 years ago with novel attempts to capture eyeballs, and are becoming relatively samey in terms of content. The article even talks about the phenomenon of "instagram face" and "UGC all looks the same."
One of the weirdest to me is twitch, before twitch/justin.tv existed did you think a platform for live streaming by anyone on the planet would be used largely for watching strangers play video games?
When a new medium is presented, especially one with lots of access, people try lots of new things on it, some succeed and some fail. People pick up on trends and fads and tend to follow them, so those things become the thing you're more apt to see if you pick at random. Those trends evolve over time. If you're looking around you can find the 'different' thing that will become the new trend, and many more things that will die off.
"Truly novel" is kinda difficult to define requirement. With literally any movie, you can argue for hours whether it was truly novel or not. But for me, just browsing netfix got me much bigger variance then what was available to me 20 to years ago.
Back then, all films were the same action movie plus some comedies, basically. They all ended well. There are good and bad characters, no nuance and good ones win. The structure was also the same and formulaic.
You could go to indie theater and see something else once in a while, but that was it. I have seen more novel things (at least novel for a movie). Not all of them were well executed, but the writers at least tried a new idea here and there. Twin sisters that switch families every year for example. It was not too good, but was not too bad and mainly it was something different.
Ehh, pearl clutching over homogeneity in art and architecture is par for the course. What the writer needs to do is expand their horizons, and possibly, their vertices. There's tons of options out there if you take a minute to look outside of -/checks notes/- ... AirBnB? Really? Is AirBnB a good place to find a representative sample of interior design diversity?
Also, homogeneity is great when properly deployed. Imagine going to a city and not having to think about how the street numbering system works, or how to navigate the metro, or how to find an ATM because of a human-centered design aesthetic that is built around routines of daily life, instead of the 9-5 commute.
I completely disagree. The article can be viewed as analysing the effects of globalisation, the growing homogeneity of spaces that starts at AirBnB and cafes and spreads.
Something is lost if you visit a new country and the layout is exactly the same as where you live. If I visit Hong Kong and I see a London tube type rail map, I'm going to be disappointed.
There is a tradeoff in not immediately knowing how to use the trains or immediately knowing how the postcode is layed out - but the gain is individuality. I lean towards keeping the individuality and not sucking out every drop of exploration into the unknown. Isn't that a big part of travelling?
The author showed some skylines from a distance and claimed all cities look the same. But that’s juts not true. Hong Kong and London look, feel, and work very differently from each other, even though the latter was a British colony.
> the growing homogeneity of spaces that starts at AirBnB and cafes and spreads
Like I said, there's options when you look outside AirBnB. There is diversity in design if you look outside the haunts of the bourgeois classes.
And look, some people want to struggle reading metro maps. I am not one of them. I, for one, am glad that Harry Beck designed the tube map that would become so influential all over the world. Praise be to Harry Beck! https://youtu.be/cTLCfl01zuE?t=201
I don't know if AirBnB is representative, but I clicked on 5 random airbnb properties from the homepage, and they all had white walls! And most had some exposed wood! Admittedly, one also had some slate walls. And another had red tiled flooring. And one was a log cabin. But if you ignore all of the differences, they are strictly identical in every respect.
> Imagine going to a city and not having to think about how the street numbering system works
I used to spend a lot of time in Seattle, which makes heavy use of numbered streets. Compared to cities with alphabetic street names, I found it harder to navigate. It's too easy to mix up a "51st Ave N" with "51st Ave NW" or a Street for an Avenue. Humans are just better at reading and remembering names.
These days all navigation is electronic. The verbosity of text names acts as a kind of redundant check on the information stream. Numbers are more of a hindrance than a help.
The "people all look the same" part is absolutely ridiculous. The overwhelming majority of people I pass by in the streets look nothing like these people (in fact, I can't even remember the last time I saw someone who looked like that in real life)
The rest of the article isn't much better in my opinion: it cites only anecdotal evidence, and it says nothing about the past state of affairs despite the title of the article being about "the age of" something.
The same goes for interiors really. Instead of looking at AirBnB, which is biased, have a browse in any real estate website, where you can see picture of places regular people actually live in. Most of them aren't curated and well presented, instead an eclectic hodgepodge put together over the years, with very little in common with the AirSpace aesthetic.
The styles that the author reviews are real trends in their market (except the paintings, which seems like an intentional publicity stunt on the part of the artists rather than a genuine trend, and it harms the piece by being the introduction - gets everything off on the wrong foot), though not as all-consuming as they are made out to be.
The author then identifies a commonality between these trends, that they are all “average”. I don’t quite see that commonality, it seems a little strained. To be frank, the stronger commonality shared by all these styles is “the author despises it”. But there sort of is something there, “average” does kinda capture something they have in common, so I’ll buy it for the sake of discussion.
So, the author has discovered the current overall aesthetic of the age. Maybe from the inside it feels like it will consume the world and nothing will change, but from the outside it’s just the current overall aesthetic of the age, there were others before it and there will be others after it. You could write a very similar article about the Victorian period, maybe titled “The Age of Ornate”, filled with complaints that every field seems to be obsessed with adding a million curlicues and embellishments to whatever they’re making. The Victorian era (in architecture, fashion, etc., basically all the same categories mentioned in the article) lasted for 70-odd years or so, I bet it felt similarly never-ending and all-consuming to some people living through it back then.
One can make parallels to other eras, sure, but the current convergence to an "average" is unprecedented in scale and speed. Various eras had a distinctive style that everything revolved around, but at least there was variety (cultural and corporate).
Nowadays I can't shake off this weird feeling of sameness emanating from every design. I can hardly distinguish brands any more, I can't tell cultures apart and that's a shame because there's never been an era with such abundance of products and expression mediums as the current one
Music is another example, which the article didn't go into, probably because it's not visual like his other examples. When I say [USA] '60s music, '70s music, '80s music and so on, you kind of know what I'm talking about. Sure, each decade had its outliers and variety, but you can probably immediately hear in your head the decade-stereotype sound I'm talking about. Each decade had that distinct fashion that the culture adopted and became known for. What is 2010's music? I have no idea. It's homogenized nothing. It's a shapeless average song, workshopped and focus-grouped to appeal to some nonexistent "Global ISO Standard Person." It's defining characteristic is its total absence of distinctiveness.
Completely disagree. Streaming has unlocked music listeners and artists to quickly iterate so that choice is boundless. Do you really think being stuck with the same sound for 10 years is a good thing? You don't know what 2010s music sounds like because it's completely individualized. Maybe that has its own problems involving increased siloization and could be linked to political tribalization but claiming its "homogenized nothing" is senseless.
I think the issue is you haven't actually found the sound you enjoy. If you just let pop radio take you on your way you're going to get lowest common denominator sound. And streaming has made this effect much worse. Now music radio is only for people who can't be assed to choose their own music, so it's even more lowest common denominator than before.
The best way I can explain it is as if we now live in a society that invented time travel and we use it to live the exact same month over and over again. We make small tweaks each loop but nothing substantive. We are comfortable in the control of this space and are now afraid of living in the future that is beyond this time window. Anyone who tries has an extremely hard go of it because they are entirely alone beyond the window. The rest of the society goes back to the beginning of the month to live it again.
I feel like a time prisoner /fugitive constantly trying to break out of this window-loop.
The author really describes the effects of globalisation, spreading through consumer culture and online media quicker than before. Capitalism is in a phase where companies are developing "world products" to ever larger audiences. A "world car" would look very different from a 1970s Jaguar, built in Britain and sold there predominantly.
Ironically, this reads like any other repetitive blogpost running with a half-baked premise. To me, the author is mostly describing culture. Things look a certain way at a certain point in history because of the averaging effects of culture. Houses from the 1950's look like houses from the 1950's. Fashion from the 1970's looks like fashion from the 1970's. Coffee shops from 2020 look like coffee shops from 2020.
The subtext seems to be that American society looks like it does, and _that's bad_. This is a more nuanced point that deserves to be examined as it applies to different aspects of our aesthetic culture. I hate Marvel movies and what they've done to mainstream cinema, but I don't particularly care if a certain type of woman wants to emulate Kim Kardashian. I think the notion that you _should_ care about this trend in the appearances of a certain type of women, especially when juxtaposed against cheugy Airbnb decor, is not a good perspective to hold onto. No one is making you decorate your house like an Airbnb, dude.
The author concludes that the current state of our aesthetic culture is a market opportunity to "reintroduce" variation. This is a flawed notion. If you succeed in changing a piece of our aesthetic culture, then you will have successfully spurred the mass-adoption of your personal brand of blandness. You may have gotten rich in the process, but you will be a failure in your stated goal.
However, I think that this current generation is fundamentally different because of a different balance between culture and counterculture driven by demographic changes.
The 50s through to the 90s were all time periods when the population was predominantly youthful, and far more likely to belong to belong to counterculture movements. Because there was a lot of them, they made up a significant market, and so advertisers would pick up counterculture movements.
But in modern times, there are a lot of baby boomers who are pretty old. Their tastes are far less likely to change at this point, there are a lot of them, and they have a lot of money.
Give it 10 years, and hopefully we will start to see some more variety. Variety is the spice of life as they say...
Travel back 2000 years and I'd bet you'd find Romans complaining that every new villa looked the same and every new toga was in the same style. Every era has a dominant aesthetic in art, design, clothing and decor, but there's still likely a greater variety in the modern era than there has been at any point in history.
What a bad take. I don't think any Romans were saying the new cathedral looks too much like the old one. Art and architecture then weren't commercialized the way they are now. People spent 600 years working on buildings they would never see complete. There were no global demonic companies rushing ugly, non-offensive (mass appeal), products out the door in literally every industry.
They absolutely were. The Romans had cookie-cutter apartment buildings too. They had mass production of pottery, textiles and other decorations by slaves.
Granted, the art and architecture that have managed to survive for 2000 years is more unique, but that's just survivorship bias.
Always was like that and I'll tell you why to the core.
We often speak about how our behaviours are shaped so we could initially survive the saber-toothed tiger - or wild animals. But it's a huge misconception when it comes to the human race. We, human, never feared much the saber-toothed tiger simply because our brain is especially good for planning. So we always planned and hunted the saber-tooth tiger. We dont really fear wild animals that much, there is no need for confirming that simple fact.
So the question is: what does human trully fear? What, would easily kill you? Like really really easily?
We fear being rejected by the group because nothing kills you faster than being rejected by the group. Once you're rejected by the group there is two outcome 1) you're dead already because the group proceeded to beat you to death or 2) you are banned - and now, not only will you face the saber-toothed tiger alone but you will meet other groups that will get socially stronger hunting you.
Get rejected by the group and just like that, you're chance of survival has drop to zero. Or close to it. In the snap of a finger.
And that's what shape our behaviours the most. People fear nothing - nothing - like being rejected. They will lie to not be. They will deny truth, they will mate with anything as long as it's socially strong.
It's not like "we are social", no, it's you die if the group doesnt accept you. Still true today.
This article can be described as the age of cherry picked samples. Most people really want silver cars (but since they want to comply with crash tests and most people want high efficiency cars you get the same designs). AirBnBs won’t sell if it doesn’t look like every modernist interior design and asking many people to output a work of art will basically look like if you take stable diffusion with some boring parameters…
If you want to see exciting cars you have to pay for it. If you want to see fun skylines you have to go to unique places (I am spoiled by Chicago). If you want a cool place to stay at you really shouldn’t do Airbnb . Unfortunately using services that are cheap or don’t have must history then everything looks the same.
> Imagine a postapocalyptic world. Beside the ruined buildings of our own civilization - St. Peter’s Basilica, the Taj Mahal, those really great Art Deco skyscrapers - dwell savages in mud huts. The savages see the buildings every day, but they never compose legends about how they were built by the gods in a lost golden age. No, they say they themselves could totally build things just as good or better. They just choose to build mud huts instead, because they’re more stylish.
This is silly. Every era's art, architecture, and fashion look similar. That's why you can even identify categories like Victorian houses, Mid-century Modern design, or expressionism. It's why you can throw a 70's party and people show up looking the part. And it's why truly great art stands out - it either creates the trend or bucks the trend.
This is sad, but it doesn’t seem all that new to me. As a kid in the 80s I remember seeing suburban subdivisions going up in all the farmland around where I lived. (I lived in one of the first subdivisions to go up.) Each new subdivision looked the same as the last. Each one used the same three or four house models repeated over and over. It was revolting. When you’d go to one strip mall, it would look pretty much the same as any other strip mall. And if you go back in time and look at say, city apartment buildings from 1900 and look at New York or San Francisco or Baltimore, they all look just about the same as each other. The only difference now is that this sameness truly global. This is the first time we’ve had a truly global society. It’s probably inevitable. But at least the current AirBnB style looks better to me than your average 1980s home style.
Who knew that the primary incentive being economic would lead to a convergence of human behaviours?
Every profit-motive champion raved about the variety produced by means of competition. Instead, the fear of failure from truly distinguishing oneself has driven competitive differences to the edge where it remains superficial and unimportant. Alpine white or cream white paint? Straight tube or spherical Edison bulbs? Nietzche or Camus on the toilet bookshelf?
In fairness, we can say that this incentive has normalized a lower bound of acceptable design in terms of function. Yes, it's bland, but it works.
But now what? The incentive needs to be transcended. The only way to do that actually is to be rich and/or crazy enough to deny the potential of economic failure. But who can afford to do that?
This hasn't changed. The Sistine chapel wasn't painted according to the whims of the peasantry.
I find it intentional on the authors part that they didn't include "capital" in any of their observations. All houses in the suburbs look the same because its... cheaper to do it that way. There's less risk involved. People don't do anything interesting to their property because of "property value". Why would I want to make my space /interesting/ when this is obviously just an investment I'm going to sell and then live in my /real/ home. (Which I won't make interesting because => go back to square 1)
Its expensive to do interesting things. The majority of businesses are not 1B profitable - they need a place to do business all the same. So an efficient box it is!
The Art example at the beginning is funny to me. People, largely, don't have a lot of ideas about what they 'want' out of any given topic they don't have a ton of interest in. I'd be willing to bet the people they asked haven't given a lot of thought into the art they preferred until they were asked. You have to actively look around to discover new things, you can't expect newness to be fed to you. Emphasis on the Discovery part.
Its all a bit, "Drawing conclusions about the world from zoomed out observations instead of actually looking into the forces that shape our world".
A tangent from the point of the post, but Komar & Melamid did a similar "experiment" with music to produce both the most wanted and most unwanted songs, and the results are amazing/hilarious.
The most unwanted song, for example, features all the thing people dislike in music (according to their surveys): opera singers rapping about cowboys, bagpipes, uncomfortably slow tempos, and choirs of children singing ad jingles among other things.
Wow. Not just an opera singer rapping, but an opera singer rapping over a drum-machine beat with what sounds like a tuba playing the bassline and discordant accordion, bagpipe, and harp riffs coming in and out.
Hahaha, this is beautifully terrible. Thanks for linking it.
An interesting perspective on "user generated content all being the same" is the research "Time-lapse Mining from Internet Photos" where time-lapse videos are reconstructed from the variations in the pictures of the same scenery being extracted to show the actual changes made over time. Even if changes in content may seem minute, it still does communicate samples of the underlying information distribution and its changes over time.
>When every supermarket aisle looks like a sea of sameness, when every category abides by the same conventions, when every industry has converged on its own singular style, bold brands and courageous companies have the chance to chart a different course. To be different, distinctive and disruptive.
I feel like the author has learned the exact wrong lesson. AirBnBs all look the same for a reason! It's the Brooklyn look! There's a reason all the AirBnBs copied their style from one of the most expensive housing markets in the world. That style was high status, and AirBnBs copied it, and eventually it became ubiquitous because people aspire to that. It's not an accident where it originated from. Convergence isn't an opportunity to diverge, it emerges from underlying driving factors. Yes, you can choose to buck that trend, but the underlying reason for the trend emerging is going to be something you have to fight against, it's going to be a disadvantage, not an advantage.
This is the consequence of our generation taking over. We, the millennials are probably the most a-historic generation, our taste and values are exceedingly the values of the petit bourgeoisie. All of our faux sophistication reflects our depressing self-centered culture, our lack of erudition and our rabid individualism.
There was a fashion in the 70s that seemed to have permeated everything.
Avacado green or burnt orange kitchen tiles, furniture, thick brown window drapes, and so on. Side burns. It must have felt like everyone/everywhere looked the same.
I am lately strangely obsessed with the decline of modern culture as seen in the MCU and Star Wars. This 'a-historic'-ness materializes itself in that the author's of She-Hulk have apparently never seen the 1970s struggle of the original Hulk, i.e., being an outcast on the run. Neither have they understood what made the original Star Wars trilogy work. Killing off the characters of Luke, Han, Lando, and Vader can only explained if the authors never understood the history of these characters.
Surely, these are all works of fiction, yet they are still part of our shared cultural history.
Very interesting. Millenials are also the most congenial generation, all social engagement is "nice". Our personalities (not just on twitter) are being homogenized as well. Conformity was a prime virtue of the bourgeoisie, it's odd that it's the only one we carried over (and not say, propriety or noblesse oblige).
It's a great article, but to me, the article does not illustrate a "trend". Rather it illustrates what has been occurring, well, for 150 years. Essentially, the commodification of everything (truly everything, there is no end in sight). This is modernity playing out, on the same track, in the same direction as it has since the 1800s.
This is why, imho, modernity was already fully understood by the 70s. This was the last generation who had still somewhat of a living memory of life outside consumer culture, of living outside the framework where daily experience is mediated by things circulating in a global market. Ellul, Baudrillard, Debord, McLuhan, Mumford, Lasch, ... all were describing "blanding" processes (to use the terminology of the article).
Sorry to continue on and hijacking this, it truly is absolutely fascinating. The effect must be even worse in the new upcoming countries. They have much less has a physical anchor than the west has.
To your point though, note also that current pop-phychology/philosophy is no longer a mash-up of Marx and Freud, which it certainly still was post WW2. I think this would help explain why we're living in "a-historical" times, as both very deeply cared about grounding thought into historical time (generally western history, nonetheless, something we no longer do).
I want to think that my growing collection of books about nuclear weapons, nuclear war, and nuclear strategy allows me to tick the quirky box among my fellow Millennials/Zillennials.
Sure. Also globalization, the internet, and cheaper flights have contributed significantly to this sameness and blandness. In the end, the same social forces are always at play: status-seeking, conformity, and many others. All of our aspirations and consumption are now globally defined.
edit: I'm not millennial, I'm a Gen-X. And this categories also contributes to this sameness and conformity.
I appreciate the original poster's conclusion though – average is an opportunity for distinction. The takeaway seems to embrace uniqueness instead of trying to make your product look like everyone else's.
My brother noticed this development as well and exploits it for brinkmanship and (imho abusive) rejection of any compromise in personal relationships.
Why argue with that one pretty girl and give in into her needs, if there's more than 10,000 other girls who look literally identical, have the same gymed up bodies, have the same personalities, same preferences and fall for the same jokes?
To me, devaluing other people like this is abhorrent, but for him it's no problem.
Also, rejecting love and affection is the dumbest thing a person will ever do (not to speak to GPs example specifically of course, i don't know the situation).
One thing that a lot of people don’t notice is that this is the result of mass manufacturing replacing craft. People want good products that are cheap, and mass manufacturing creates them. Things made in a factory at scale are always cheaper and can even be better quality than low-scale goods. But once companies have sunk the capital into the factory that can churn this stuff out, they want to keep making the same stuff, not retooling and redesigning the factory. So minor changes occur but the basic template becomes very rigid. Once you start looking for it the factory-goods stubbornness to change is everywhere.
I think this is just the consequence of making things at scale. Society as a whole benefits: most people have more and better stuff relative to their wealth level than people in the past. But craftsmanship disappears or becomes substantially more expensive, and with it the diversity and range of design fades away.
To use Loos's example, the original mass manufactured table was sturdy and practical. Its simple design meant that it would not to the fickle changes in fashion. This was the positive promise of mass manufacturing.
There's no natural law that scaling up production should imply that things are of lower quality. Yet, that's where we are.
Am I the only one who thinks that this phenomenon has pretty much always existed? The only difference today, as far as I can tell, is globalization. Things are simply less exotic now because homogeneity is becoming less localized.
If I were to really grasp at straws to defend the other position, maybe the contemporary aesthetic has become overly minimalist and utilitarian, as opposed to being style oriented. Restaurants are now cement cubes, all new apartment complexes look like hotels with a white|beige|gray palette and are also cubic, modern cars are all white and bulbous-looking, skyscrapers are either cubic or (ironically) overly whimsical in architecture to the point where they appear to have no obvious function. Perhaps if standard designs and architecture were less boring, people wouldn't care so much about homogeneity.
This effect will only be exacerbated by the ubiquitous use of AI, which by design is trained on everything humans have already produced, and will trend toward the average in the results it produces. Perhaps this is the key advantage that humans have: the ability to be different?
The AirBNB example is horrible. I've worked on ranking side of a very similar hotel aggregator app. Certain pics are boosted because users click on them more, the AirBNB hosts then see this and make their house more conforming to the top pictures. A few cycles of this and you've got complete homogeneity. Same with Instagram Models, Youtube thumbnails, Book covers etc.
I want to point out a key difference. It's not that people like a specific thing, it's more that a kafkaesque algorithm boosts specific traits. People realize this and start to mimic those traits.
The infrastructure arguments falls flat because creativity requires money which most buildings have scarcity of. So they mostly follow the cookie cutter model.
It's worth understanding how some people's idea of what is "great" (elite) is formed. Friedrich Nietzsche's endurance as a philosopher is a good index of the popularity of such ideas:
>Nobody grows rich or poor anymore: both are too much of a burden. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both are too much of a burden. No herdsman and one herd.
Uniqueness, standing out from a "mediocre" herd, "acceptance" of "harsh realities," etc. are not just how some people decide to enjoy themselves, but also how they look down upon others.
and in the 1700 and 1800s - peasant farmers all wore the same thing. whats with all the wigs and makeup in that same eras aristocracy? AND WHATS THE DEAL WITH AIRLINE PEANUTS AM I RIGHT?!
That's not true. In the 1700s and 1800s peasants across the world dressed differently. There was local conformity, certainly, but global diversity.
There's something insidious that is happening, so slow we are not recognizing it (centuries now). It is that man is fully submitting to the machine. We are adapting, not just in what we buy (cause we've been nothing but consumers), but in how we comport ourselves in our relations to others. We are internalizing the value system of the machine on a global scale.
I fear LLMS/Image generation will only make this worse. I imagine many people now type in "please list for me 10 ideas for a mint gum tagline" for a spark of inspiration, or will generate mocks of art using sketches fed into an image transformer. The thing they don't think about when doing this however, is that it's just operating on what it's been fed, while if people from another brand do the same, they'll also get a similar result. I guess we've outsourced inspiration and now have to deal with the consequences.
0. The vehicle similarity has a name: jellybean cars.
1. So this explains why hipsters all look the same too.
2. If one desired to create different enough to look different, then they should stop looking at everyone and everything else to minimize bias. Forget the outside world and what they might think. It also reduces personal discontent and misery by avoiding comparisons with others. Perhaps the Amish have something by choosing purposefully plain almost uniforms as the antithesis of Instagram.
My knee-jerk reaction to this article was pretty negative, but that's because the initial example (the paintings) is pretty bad. This experiment was made in the worst possible way: the same two artists rendering their interpretation of what different people say they want, and the paintings are unsurprisingly similar: the same bluish sky, the same tree to the right, the same mountain to the left. As an example, it's terrible and unscientific: it's pretty much a statement on these two painters, and not much else. It's impossible, for example, that every person interviewed wanted a tree to the right of the painting -- that's just what the artists themselves preferred. It's also questionable whether people actually want what they claim to want in an interview.
That said, it's hard to deny the other examples are spot on. I suspect they are cherry picked (surely you can find celebrities that do NOT look like those in the example), but I find these samey blandness everywhere. It's on the "Netflix look", it's on book covers, it's on how malls and supermarkets look, etc.
As it turns out, every part of humanity is subject to the law of physics.
If you churn some water with a bit of soap in it, a lot of large bubbles will form on top. Just wait a few seconds, and those bubbles that are too large will divide into smaller ones, and those that are too small will be absorbed by the large. This happens naturally, without prompting, and it happens regardless of the original configuration of the bubbles.
We believe that we are exempt from something like this. That there is something special about the human brain that makes it possible for it to maintain some anomalous state indefinitely.
There is not. There is nothing special about our minds. Just like the bubbles, the system settles. The square edges are sanded off; the too small or the too large, absorbed.
When the energy flowing into the system changes, that is how you know that the configuration might change. Have a look:
I can't find the link to it right now, but there's an article / post that says a lot of the blandness in our surroundings / houses is because we subconsciously try to balance it out with all the color we have available on our digital screens. Walls are bland white / gray because we have televisions, everything else is bland because the entire world is in our phones.
And yes, globalization is yet another reason why. Even travelling to places is pretty boring now, it's just the same things. It takes a while for the reality to sink in, but our entire economy is now based on being bland. To the extent any country deviates from the USA it is deemed "undeveloped".
there is a clear self-reinforcing loop between A what's offered and B what's picked that is based on both A and B looking for the trend and only slightly controlled by A and B looking not to be too generic and to be somewhat original
the more investment required, the safer people will play it
it seems to me that the examples picked:
- collectively commissioned art
- cars
- interior design
- building design
are all things that have become increasingly taxing investments, at least in terms of perception, and the bigger that impression is the safer people will play it and the more they will try to copy others and look at what's trendy
this is compounded by hypersocialisation and the share economy - if you buy a house to rent out, or to show online, you want it to be a safely designed house like those that are succeeding and are popular, and your particular quirks and tastes, if you have any contrarian ones at all, you'd rather suppress them for the sake of the business
The article purports to be an investigation to find out what people like; but feels much more like they started off with a conclusion and then went looking for evidence to support that.
This seems very similar to many news stories or scientific studies these days. Start off with a narrative. Highlight anything that supports your narrative. Ignore anything that contradicts it.
Although they weren't mentioned, social media and streaming video are the most striking cases. There's one flavor of social media website and it sucks. It's the same infinite scrolling page of 30s attention grabbing headline/video/images posted by the same people on the same 5 or 6 websites made by the same set of engineers. There are minor variations, but they're better described as "positioning" than truly differentiated experiences. What makes instagram "better" (or worse) than tiktok or twitter? It's the same soup filling the contours of the same, slightly differently shaped bowl.
Streaming video is even less differentiated. Every player looks more or less the same now and the content is largely fungible between platforms. It used to be that Netflix had superior selection and had the best player, but content has been balkanized and every platform looks and works roughly the same way. Almost every platform is now targeting the same type of content: low cost, easy to mass produce, and mass consumable. I will give youtube and twitch credit for being quite different -- at one time. Now, for whatever reasons, these services seem like they're on a steady march towards homogeneity too.
There are signs of the phenomenon the article describes everywhere and it seems to have happened across most artistic and business disciplines around the same time period. I would be very curious to know the ages of some of the posters in this thread since there are some interesting differences in opinion/experience. If you see it, you see it and feel it everywhere, but if you never saw what life was like before there's no way to make any kind of comparison. There were places and services and things objects that did not even attempt to cater to average expectations. That difference was real, in ways both tangible and abstract. This article won't resonate with posters in their 20's like it does for those in their 40's.
All the websites look the same but it's mostly because all the frameworks are the same. I'm thinking mainly of Bootstrap and Zurb Foundation. They share a lot of the same principles such as the 12-column grid, general typographic dimensions, button styles, etc. Granted, a lot of that stuff is for good reasons. In point of actual fact, I've studied their final CSS products and they share quite many implementation details.
There's also that "rule of threes" which almost every client likes.
Also, most of the new fonts are derivative. Amazon Ember looks like a bland mashup of Calibri and ITC Officina, like the latter of which a lot of other fonts look, and the former of which is bland as heck. Poppins looks like ITC Avant Garde Gothic. TheSansMono kind of looks like Consolas. There are a truckload of direct modifications of DejaVu Sans Mono/Bitstream Vera Sans Mono. Bitstream eVera Sans is a fugly bizarro version of Verdana/Tahoma.
I came across an article a year ago, but I can't find it now. It shows the difference between ancient archtictures and modern ones. Like churches, masjids, temples, and houses. Then shows how modern buildings looks like a lego in the middle of nature. Does this description reminds anyone here with a similar article?
The coworking space where I work took the exact opposite approach. For each new location they hire an artist and let him go wild on the decoration, they have an in-house team of architects to make it happen. It makes for interesting social dynamics since people with similar taste tend to gather at the same place, and the variety also encourage people to move location to see something different. But it has another more pragmatic benefit for the coworking company; the locations will not go out of style at the same time and so they don’t have to renovate all locations simultaneously.
On the contrary, I think this is a great example for how similar co-working spaces look. Even though this company apparently tried hard to make them look different, the pictures are so similar:
- All the ceilings have exposed "industrial" elements such as ventilation pipes, cables or unpainted metal.
- They are all very spacious with lots of exposed floor but no carpets (to make them easier to clean I assume)
- Modern, minimalist furniture
- The occasional plant here and there, but potted as to not introduce any dirt
- Non-distracting and almost bland color scheme. Notice how even the painting on the wall fades into the background.
They have more vibrant colors, more contrasts, less open space and more furniture overall. There are bookshelves and many unneeded but beautiful items like vases or small paintings. The ceilings have exposed wood and the floors are covered by carpets or are at least patterned.
It's hard to disagree with the fact that brand identities are being stripped back of personality (aka all look the same). I wonder if there's a cause related to our social context:
- It could be that this is the moment in history with the most visible amount of brands out there. It's inevitable that two designers land on a very similar solution without knowing about each other's work
- It could be intentional: we live in the era of information noise. Brands are happy to strip back their personality and identity so that the message (their ads) can take the spotlight
- Visuals are being dumbed down to increase usability: consumers are tired of making sense of strident brands, so they appreciate keeping it simple
I skimmed through the article and I could immediately correlate it with another article[1] that I could relate a lot with.
My frustration is primarily because of lack of good movies coming out of Hollywood which has been churning out remakes after remakes or some decade long running sequels. I guess a question worth asking as we stand on the cusp of first quarter of the new millennium is, what are the lasting cultural artefacts that we are building? What is it that we can call truly as our own? Could be a music form, architectural style, painting form etc.,
While it's a bit dull and boring, eventually when everyone sees what everyone else sees (as we do when we all have internet connected devices with cameras) then our styles and tastes will also be converging. Which will be the "winning" one will depend on context. In some cases it's going to be a boring convergence to an arbitrary or bland style, in others it's boing to be simply an adaptation of somethin that's objectively good. This isn't just about style, it's about everything. If something is objectively better (E.g. single faucet with hot/cold instead of the UK traditional double faucet) then the better one will take over. And that will happen once people realize there is an alternative to the status quo.
"The apartment-house tenant must have the freedom to lean out of his window and as far as his arms can reach transform the exterior of his dwelling space. And he must be allowed to take a long brush and as far as his arms can reach paint everything pink, so that from far away, from the street, everyone can see: there lives a man who distinguishes himself from his neighbours, the pent-up livestock! He must also be allowed to cut up the walls and make all kinds of changes, even if this disturbs the architectural harmony of a so-called masterwork, and he must be able to fill his room with mud or children's modelling clay.
But the lease prohibits this!"
- Friedensreich Hundertwasser
There must be a name for this phenomenon where someone sits in their academic study, spends time smartly and refinedly analyzing some aspects of social behavior, and among myriad possible theories they select the one where mankind, in general, is stupid, philistine, average...
The reason why things were more varied in previous generations is the speed of communications. it took much longer for fashions to permeate through society, this mean that more local variations happened.
Now, fashions are almost always global, but they still change at the same rate. The difference being is that they change much more in unison across the globe.
This is contrary to my experience: trends and fashion were short lived, trends lasting maybe half a year, and the fashion of the last season was definitely "out". Nowadays, there's a previously unknown stability and trends shift just minimally. Which enables this "everything looks the same" phenomenon as there is minimal variation over time and lots of room for aesthetics to spread and eventually engulf and embrace everything, there is.
(I've been observing this for at least the past 15 years or so. This feels more like the "post-history" of fashion.)
Edit: Regarding the speed of communications, mind that there were much read, trend-setting magazines, which came out periodically, every week or every month and that they had to make a point, relative to the previous issues. And, as a reader, you wouldn't have referred to a past issue from half a year ago. Moreover, past issues were hard to come upon, as they weren't sold anymore. Now compare this to websites, which keep lingering around (you wouldn't discard last month's posts) and platforms, where trends gradually gain momentum, until they eventually become ubiquitous. (At this point, a trend would have been "out" and "uncool", previously, but now this is when they are really enforced by algorithms.) I'd rather argue, for things like fashion, the speed of communications has decreased considerably and stability has increased, thanks to technology.
The idea was the world went through a drastic change with WWII and the Victorian mansion started seeming like a ghostly remnant of the earlier age.
Antiques Roadshow had a similar podcast where they discussed the "brown is down" phenomenon.
Did the fast-changing fashions of the postwar era reflect something about normal trends, or was it a sort of equilibrating phenomenon, and now we've returned to some normal again, that we haven't seen in over 100 years?
I wonder if you were to travel pre-world-war era if you'd come to the same conclusion about the speed at which fashions change. Maybe but maybe not.
Coincidentally I was talking to my spouse last night about how if you look through architecture and design websites and magazines, the stuff you see is different from what we were referring to "real estate style" and here was referred to as "Airbnb" style. In architecture and design circles there's less uniformity and more color and contrast.
The problem with this I've found is that it's difficult to find something different, of the sort in architectural circles. So if you want some of this stuff you often have to have it custom made, or made by a single boutique manufacturer, which is expensive and difficult.
So some of this uniformity in style I think is international economies of scale, which creates supply constraints and a sort of monopsony of sorts. This might be reinforcing in turn.
Something that was always fascinating to me: there had been a time, around 1100, when the style of ceilings in sacral architecture was "discussed" with urgency and churches went through 3 redesigns and rebuilds in just 10 years (from a flat ceiling, to barrel vault, to cross ribs, which became predominant in about 1105/1107 – there are several examples). This is totally unthinkable nowadays, where buildings that went through planning and construction phases of a decade and more are still considered "dernier ci".
> Did the fast-changing fashions of the postwar era reflect something about normal trends, or was it a sort of equilibrating phenomenon, and now we've returned to some normal again, that we haven't seen in over 100 years?
I'm living in a city where most of the buildings are 100+ years old. (The house I'm living in was built in 1904.) You can usually date a building from that era by about +/- 2 years of accuracy, just by the looks, regardless, whether it's art nouveau or a more conservative expression of style. However, as you approach WWII, things considerably slowed down. (Mostly for economic reasons.)
I think, this idea of a mostly stable era is a product of the shift in paradigms, you mentioned before, where we put anything that happened before in a paradigmatic box. (E.g., like it has just recently happened with brutalism, where a wide variety and evolution of concepts and oppositions was subsumed into the same thing.)
Yes, good point. I was thinking as I was writing that it isn't exactly the world wars, something like the leadup into it and through the interwar period. I was more thinking of the post-industrial revolution in general, which was associated with tremendous societal change in general, not just militarily speaking. But you're right that the idea of a uniform "Victorian" period is a little weird and/or misleading.
Do they really change though? The car example from the article feels stale, yet every single new car looks exactly like the cars on the picture. The stupid instagram face has been a thing since before covid. The movie posters go back to 2001, and I've seen a fair share of bleeding, crying, creepy eyes on the horror movie posters since then.
It feel like we're stuck in a global, homogenized, test-group-approved fashion loop.
To a certain degree is isn't fashion; it's optimisation.
Of course cars are going to look mostly the same. If you change anything too much (e.g. cybertruck) you're just straying from a highly optimised design.
Look at bicycles. Before the invention of the safety bike there were lots of different designs. But the safety bike is such a good design you can't really get away with it.
Or phones. Everyone complains about glass rectangles and where are the sliders and flip phones? They don't exist anymore because the glass rectangle is such a good design.
Agreed. Reading this I thought "all of these things are superficial, who cares?"
Who cares if movie posters and book titles are converging towards something that markets well? The parts that matter (the content, themes, style, etc) are probably very different among all those books/movies.
IMO Fashion like this exists just so that salesmen can convince consumers that they can buy The Current Thing and earn respect from their peers. Chasing the latest furniture, latest clothes, latest cars, etc.. It's all a shallow, costly signal of wealth that excludes the not-wealthy and distracts the wealthy from more fulfilling/productive pursuits.
If this trend means that fashion is dying, good riddance.
Fashion used to have an important social and cultural function as it provided signals and markers for group alignment in society. As these kept changing periodically, this also gave a chance for realignment and reconsideration. (Compare this to the increasingly-caught-in-the-bubble phenomenon that we experience nowadays.)
E.g., just compare major fashion trends in the 1970s (from mini to maxi, to bell-bottoms, to pants and tube socks & disco attire, to clogs and para jackets, to college look vs. punk) to the major fashion trends of the last decade (slim fit). This variation from season to season, while, of course, invented as a vehicle for marketing, actually provided a vehicle for repositioning in a varying landscape of tribal subcultures that was typical, then.
It reminds me of things that are not superficial though, for example the homogenization of universities. Top schools all now mostly fall in line with "peer institutions", whereas you used to find schools that catered at least somewhat to different educational philosophies and personalities - which I think made for a richer academic discourse.
Places like Stanford and MIT slowly become more Harvard every year IMO, and it sucks for student life too. Driving forces may not be exactly the same, but I think there are cultural undertones pervasive across these changes and some of the more superficial ones. It reminded me of this article: https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2022/12/stanford-hates-fu...
Anecdotally, I think it affects science too. Grants become increasingly formulaic, and anything deviating even slightly intellectually only has a chance as a token "high risk" project. People are afraid of saying something wrong that also clashes with current scientific norms, so everything seems so damn homogenous despite the many questions we still have little answer for.
I think the "optimization" process that got us here is bad in part because it is optimizing for a single institution style that independently will do fine, and is thus a safe play for any decent university. However that is not the same as the set of institutions that would collectively do the best, not even close IMO. Homogenization can be efficient and should happen to some degree within an institution. But between institution diversity is already bad and continuing to die off year over year.
This is alarming to me and I think there is something to the aesthetics that go with it. People's behavior can absolutely be impacted by the broader cultural vibe that pervades. Signaling is important too - when you go to visit MIT and see the dingy af student center it is part of the model you build about what the school cares about. Selecting a specific type of student body is much easier when it goes both ways, because good luck assessing someone's motivations on a modern college app. When surface-level marketing becomes homogenous across the board it is going to have downstream impacts.
And now the convergence is going to be massively accelerated by LLMs and generative art/video and code tools.
Because these work best (actually only work at all) in the middle lane of the masses of text/images/code that they ingest, and from which they generate their output.
They generate the most likely output to result from the given input. This necessarily homogenizes out any surprise or highly valuable information. We get the most average output
(which, to be fair to their creators, is an average of the above-average human inputs, since they are training on the output of skilled humans in each field, and e.g., that grammar of GPT-4 is noticeably better than almost all current journalists, even when it is hallucinating an answer)
> “In nearly every country all people really wanted was a landscape with a few figures around, animals in the foreground, mainly blue.”
Despite soliciting the opinions of over 11,000 people, from 11 different countries, each of the paintings looked almost exactly the same.
I am literally amazed, all that effort. In my modest European country, there were kitsch painters offering their "art" by tens, for very cheap at resorts near seaside or at mountains resorts.
All were like in the article, mainly blue, with few humans in the background and some possible animals in the foreground. Blue lakes near the mountains, bluea sea, hut with huge blue sky.
This article is implicitly also an example of Hotelling's Law [0]
Essentially, it's rational for firms to move towards "the middle" of the market. That could be the middle of a boardwalk if you are a hot dog stand or the middle of the political spectrum if you are a politician.
It's not necessarily because of testing but rather because being in the middle gives you access to the largest section of the market.
As a counter point, you could argue that a counterpoint is the expression "there are riches in the niches".
One of the strategies a politician could use to move towards the middle is creating a Sister Souljah moment [0]
A Sister Souljah moment is a politician's calculated public repudiation of an extremist person, statement, group or position that is perceived to have some association with the politician's own party.
No comment on the argument. All I did was scroll through the pictures. Was hoping to see the "corporate memphis" example or AAPL, GOOG, MSFT, and probably others all using the same branding colors.
The worst part of this trend, IMHO, is related to electronic devices, especially smartphones.
The iPhone design is great in many aspects, and it covers quite a few use cases, but not all of them, there should be space for alternatives, different form factors, different styles.
We often tend to blame individuality and selfishness, but at the collective level our herd behavior is quite a bit stronger than our individuality.
The implied heuristic behind herd behavior is that some individuals are taking the risk, and the group follows those who succeed. But when nobody is taking risk we're all losing.
The amusing point of all this average-ness is that every once in awhile a company does a wild rebrand that tries to set them apart from their competition.
e.g. Dropbox rebrand in 2017... remember that? Wild colours, weird fonts, blocky text, lots of white space..
Why do you think there was a golden age when there wasn't mediocrity, average-ness, simple and cheap and utilitarian designs?
Is it because the bland cars and houses and advertisements from back in the day weren't nice enough to get preserved into the historical record? Maybe the people who owned those things weren't rich enough to take and keep pictures or videos of them, or weren't considered important enough to have aspects of their existence celebrated in media, media that were saved for posterity?
Most people instinctively hate things that are truly new or different or generally stand out. It may be due to cognitive limitations or maybe just common instinct.
That's why the conclusion of the article doesn't work. You can't sell anything that's truly new or different. I think that the only way trends change is when so many people have tried that the herd has basically migrated to that new position accidentally inch-by-inch. It will trample all of the people leading the way and deny that they existed.
dimensions are agonisingly chosen to please
the needs of the wind tunnel, to adhere to
government safety regulations, to properly
accommodate the average American family’s
collective weight of 78,000 lbs., and to
allow for enough cargo space for all their
crap
Look, I know we have an obesity problem. But the collective weight of the average family is not 78,000lbs!
I'm thinking they meant 780lbs (354kg) although even that seems a bit high.
But on the one area I can speak intelligently about, video games, this article is dead wrong. There has been an explosion of experimentation in terms of anything measurable: genres, art styles, etc. And from a product/ company point of view, this can be seen by the diversity of who is winning. The largest game in the world in terms of revenue AND number of users is Minecraft, which looks zero like the next best selling game.
My impression of the article is, that things do not look the same.
Apartments: wooden floors white walls straight roof light-shade chairs/sofas square tables pastel colors windows
Car brands - I can't even pick any similarity, except that they're all black and white, which the author literally made up (Toyota and BMW's brands are colorful).
Toothbrushes: white colorless buttons LEDs white brushes long has a brush
I really don't understand what the author is talking about.
The good thing about living in today's world is that nothing is as easy as escaping the blandocracy. You don't want big franchise video games? There's a googol of indie video games on itch and steam and co. You want weird ass looking appartments. Guess what, they're on airbnb too. You want music? Books? Software? The weirdest communities? A text-mode orange website? They're all out there for you to use and discover.
One area not discussed: the jokes are all the same.
It’s gotten to the point that I rarely use social media react buttons at all when I see friends sharing memes. I know they didn’t come up with it themselves and I grow tired of endless memes that cover nearly identical ground.
I enjoy making people laugh if I post something on Facebook but it will be something I experienced myself. Not some meme whose author I couldn’t credit if I tried.
A few of the examples is a bit unfair like houses look the same, but in reality they are same because the structure works and the building code are more easily adhered when they look like that, instead of say a parallelogram, and it’s more efficient to work with the current set of technologies + materials that are readily available.
I do agree we are not taking enough risks in art but instead trying to please everyone’s tastes
I would say that if you were to take similar use buildings from same period of time they would look very close to each other. Ofc, there is always some trend setters or outliers, but in general they would look pretty close to each other or follow certain formula. It is just less apparent as we see mix of those periods very often.
One example that is missing but would actually have been more obvious is the smartphone. They basically all look the same.
It seems to me that some winners emerge, which makes other competitors want to replicate the winner's formula. Over time all products end up the same. Trying to deviate from that sameness will either result in customers not being interested or everyone copying you. This may be bad for innovation.
You could just as well ask why do keyboards all look the same? There is always convergence in user interfaces because consumers don’t want to relearn every time they buy a new device.
Sure, the overall shape doesn't give a lot of leeway for design. But other details like the home button (early iPhones), absence of jack sockets, disappearance of navigation buttons (like early Samsung Galaxys), etc. follow the same trajectory.
All of those examples do look the same, as long as you ignore the ways in which they look different. If you do that, then it all makes pretty good sense as an argument. If you start pointing out how they aren't all the same, then the argument breaks down a little bit. Take your pick of approaches, depending on whether you are predisposed to agree or disagree with the thesis.
If you spend some time traveling the world you will see not everything is the same. From Tel Aviv to Mumbai to New Zealand. They're all different with different people, cultures, coffee shops, foods, languages, history, etc, etc.
I am actually developing a web app that highlights these differences. Each week a different country is highlighted and users can post content about that country.
One thing that's not captured in this discussion is that design trends change a lot even if they converge in a given time period. I remember at one point all of my friends had a colorful personal website full of interactive bootstrap components. Now, they all favor a minimal design with just links to their resume/socials.
I used to think that the convergence of similar branding (logos, colors, etc) was the product of corporations hiring the same marketing consultants, but the part about the instagram aesthetic blew my mind. Looking through my wife's feed, a lot of women post pics in similar clothes, in similar poses, in similar locations, doing similar activities.
You see the same thing in companies that use A/B testing to drive all of their decisions. They land on a local maxima and then stick with it. Radical ideas get pushed out even if they could represent a new maxima.
The problem with purely data driven design is that you get faster horses instead of cars.
We need a new generation of tastemakers to just start designing beautiful things.
There possible many reasons for that. One of them (specially cars), cost is a real factor here. Normally some company develop a car framework and the other vendors, buy it and just tweak it for its own market.
Other point that worth to mention is that today, people are consuming same media, culture and having the same idols, regardless of their physical location.
This is a great podcast that discusses the topic of body size as it relates to sizing of clothes, sizing equipment for the military (cockpits, etc.); https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/on-average/
What a strange article. Alternative title: "How to cherry pick your data to make any point"?
(By the way, I am not even concerned with the observation being more truthy than false. It's just so blatantly written to drive home the conclusion that they missed their chance to add anything of interest to answer the question).
Interestingly, this may not be the first time when this has happened.
In the ancient Roman Empire, important buildings, fora, aqueducts, amphitheathers ... were remarkably similar across vast stretches of territory, even though there was no instant communication and no photography, only hand-drawn sketches on paper/papyrus.
It's not surprising that things evolve to a "best fit". Airplanes and cars are a good example. Is the reason they all look similar due to a lack of imagination, or is it due to them all converging on a form that provides the best "bang for the buck"? It is surely the latter.
> The Instagram pictures we post, the tweets we read, the TV we watch, the app icons we click, the skylines we see, the websites we visit and the illustrations which adorn them all look the same.
It sounds like the author is speaking to a clique of their similar friends.
I’m clearly in a different world; I see wild diversity in aesthetics and function around me every day. Conformity and convergence? Yes, it’s there but all around it is the beautiful chaos of creativity and divergence.
I’m struggling to come up with a useful response here. I’ll focus on things driven by human “decisions” rather than natural phenomena.
Cars are all the same, yet they aren’t - purposes, shapes and colors vary as to the creative and expressive customizations. Music has areas of “sameness” but also throngs of small and bright performances that are far from them.
It’s a bit tongue in cheek, but I do notice people seem prone to take the same photos over and over again. I feel like 1000 years from now they’ll be saying “wtf? why did they do that?”.
The reminds me of what I think it is an established product marketing concept: people generally want something that is the "same", but with a new twist to make it slightly different.
Your vertebrate example is not convergence, it is non-divergence plus common origin. There are biological examples of convergence (e.g., everything is crab [0]), but that's not one of them.
I wonder if the next fad would be an "authentic" beat up style? Like lets buy this place and serve coffee without even replacing the 70s tiles and sinks?
It's easy to avoid these homogenizing trends, just dig through historical art works from different time periods and from different regions of the world.
>> This article argues that from film to fashion and architecture to advertising, creative fields have become dominated and defined by convention and cliché. Distinctiveness has died. In every field we look at, we find that everything looks the same.
It’s a very sad thing to witness, the death of uniqueness, distinct identity. Part of me hesitatingly attributes it to wokeness and cancel culture. People are more afraid now than ever of being cancelled. This makes it harder to be unique for fear of being offensive. With that comes a true regression to the mean.
I’m surprised that the author didn’t mention LLMs. Their power is not in their ability to write—-they are simply not at a literary level. However, they write average prose (which is often grammatical, as the deviations considered non-grammatical tend to cancel each other out) very well and very fast. You could say they are not MOC, but they are Paul Graham. And that’s scary, because even the Paul Graham level is good enough to mount a disinformation campaign, as the success of Y Combinator literally proves.
The point is, people like certain things aesthetically. It used to be that artists and designers were still trying to figure out what looks good, and trying all the things. But now we've tried so many things and we've gotten better at zeroing in the precise aesthetics viewers and consumers want. We've converged.
Sure, you can design electric toothbrush branding that "stands out", but it's probably going to result in less sales. Because most people don't want to express their unique personality via their electric toothbrush, they just want a nice slim white object that blends into their sink area.
The great mistake that this article makes is thinking that people need to be constantly expressing themselves in some unique way that nobody's ever done before. But the world has almost 8 billion people, few things are as unique as you think.
Can't we just enjoy having nice things? Even if those things have converged aesthetically? They've converged because we think they're nice. Things don't need to be different just for the sake of being different. Because different can also be worse.