Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The age of average

alexmurrell.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 493 posts

Re: The age of average

#101

Post by zeroonetwothree »

qwertfisch wrote: post #76

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 do…

Film is much less creative. But look at television and you see a different story. We have far more creativity and variety than ever before.

Re: The age of average

#103

Post by tycho-newman »

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 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

Re: The age of average

#104

Post by stereolambda »

Mizoguchi wrote: post #36
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…

Agree. 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…

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.

Re: The age of average

#105

Post by zeroonetwothree »

sakex wrote: post #99

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.

Re: The age of average

#106

Post by drewcon »

Isn’t this just…Darwinism?

We could say the same thing about biological convergence in animals.

The average vertebrate animal…

Two eyes, two ears, one mouth, one brain, two sexes, five digits, moving around on appendages.

It converges because it works.

Re: The age of average

#107

Post by pelasaco »

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.

Re: The age of average

#108

Post by unavoidable »

anthomtb wrote: post #70
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.

I'm no expert but sewage seems rather simple in a tall building. You have gravity on your side so you "just" need longer pipes. Its getting the fresh water up that should get exponentially more difficult as building height increases.

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.

Re: The age of average

#109

Post by m3kw9 »

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

Re: The age of average

#110

Post by stephc_int13 »

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.

Post reply on HN