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The age of average

alexmurrell.co.uk

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Re: The age of average

#301

Post by GauntletWizard »

bluetomcat wrote: post #192
nradov wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that a trap? Would people be better off if they wanted different things than "the West"? Are Japan and South Korea part of "the West"? Looking around my home I see a lot of stuff designed in those countries.

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.

Re: The age of average

#302

Post by nwienert »

psychoslave wrote: post #83

What can I say, criticism of mediocracy all look the same: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/51961637 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/104973152110363... https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jems.12469 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1049731520974764 https://revistaseletronicas.pucrs.br/ojs/index.php/revistafa... http://manuscript.elsevier.com/S004727271500119X/pdf/S004727... http…

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!

Re: The age of average

#303

Post by makeitdouble »

bumby wrote: post #139
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…

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,…

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.

Re: The age of average

#304

Post by nottorp »

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 they seem to carry negative connotations here

... and for good reason. Or perhaps I'm weird in wanting at least my entertainment to be varied, instead of 1280 indistinguishable netflix series?

Re: The age of average

#305

Post by pclmulqdq »

acuozzo wrote: post #172
Last5Digits wrote: post #135

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 r…

> 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…

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.

Re: The age of average

#306

Post by pastacacioepepe »

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…

> 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.

Re: The age of average

#307

Post by jedberg »

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.

Re: The age of average

#308

Post by prakhar897 »

Am I dumb or is this article pseudoscience?

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.

Re: The age of average

#309

Post by teodorlu »

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…

> 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?

Stability enables movement.

Re: The age of average

#310

Post by hindsightbias »

ravenstine wrote: post #188

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. Restaur…

Maybe some things need to be utilitarian to extremes.

I could live in THX-1138 world as long as I get to drive a Lola T70 through the BART tunnels.

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