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The age of average

alexmurrell.co.uk

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Re: The age of average

#91

Post by SteveDR »

KaiserPro wrote: post #14

Congratulations, you've found fashion. 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.

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.

Re: The age of average

#92

Post by spankalee »

SamBam wrote: post #90
sidewndr46 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 i…

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.

Re: The age of average

#93

Post by muyuu »

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

Re: The age of average

#94

Post by andsoitis »

Mali- wrote: post #74
tycho-newman wrote: post #65

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. Imag…

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 th…

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.

Re: The age of average

#95

Post by the_af »

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.

Re: The age of average

#97

Post by mmkhd »

Ekaros wrote: post #13
sparsely wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> look at listings of new apartments

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.

Re: The age of average

#98

Post by pier25 »

uhtred wrote: post #56
slindsey wrote: post #5

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 ar…

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.

It's the same that has always happened. Human groups tend to become homogeneous because this helps survival.

The difference is now the cultural bubble is global and of course it's completely irrelevant for survival.

Re: The age of average

#99

Post by sakex »

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.

Re: The age of average

#100

Post by bux93 »

tycho-newman wrote: post #65

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. Imag…

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.
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