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

241–250 of 493 posts

Re: The age of average

#241

Post by JoeJonathan »

littlelady wrote: post #124
JoeJonathan wrote: post #73

Three things: 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,…

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 converg…

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.

Re: The age of average

#242

Post by epups »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #237
crazygringo wrote: post #123

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 ma…

On the contrary! 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…

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.

Re: The age of average

#243

Post by epups »

titzer wrote: post #221
crazygringo wrote: post #123

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 ma…

> 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…

> 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.

Re: The age of average

#244

Post by eutropia »

This rhymes with a few other articles and blog posts:

Wither Tartaria? https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria

> 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.

Colors: Where did they go? An investigation.

https://www.vox.com/culture/22840526/colors-movies-tv-gray-d... > Why do so many TV shows and movies look like they were filmed in a gray wasteland?

Re: The age of average

#245

Post by ProfessorLayton »

ryandrake wrote: post #148
bumby wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

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 t…

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.

Re: The age of average

#246

Post by mint2 »

isk517 wrote: post #149
crazygringo wrote: post #123

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 ma…

As much as some openly oppose the idea, and others secretly do, we really are just a single species with fairly uniform tastes.

No. We Are Not.

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.

Re: The age of average

#247

Post by TheCoelacanth »

johnlocke8 wrote: post #49
staminade wrote: post #24

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.

Re: The age of average

#248

Post by mint2 »

crazygringo wrote: post #123

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 ma…

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.

Re: The age of average

#249

Post by runnerup »

pnw wrote: post #229
nradov wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: The age of average

#250

Post by p0pcult »

crazygringo wrote: post #123

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 ma…

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.

Call it the tyranny of data science.

Post reply on HN