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The age of average

alexmurrell.co.uk

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Re: The age of average

#391

Post by marketerinland »

citizenpaul wrote: post #387
groby_b wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a core point. 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…

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.

This ^

I read once that grey cars have the highest possibility of accidents for this exact reason.

And since then have only driven white cars.

Re: The age of average

#392

Post by pixl97 »

eimrine wrote: post #340
epups wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

>Why don't they expect the best one?

Best is multi-dimensional, so please tell me 'best what'.

Is 'best' affordable?

Is 'best' compatible with what I learned without invested more time in learning something new?

Is 'best' something that's going to live far beyond it's usefulness based on it's cost?

Is 'best' something you can't hand to someone else and have them use it?

Re: The age of average

#393

Post by zacharyvoase »

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?

Re: The age of average

#394

Post by pixl97 »

mxmbrb wrote: post #341
thomastjeffery wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 pro…

>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.

Re: The age of average

#395

Post by nicenewtemp84 »

ProfessorLayton wrote: post #374
nicenewtemp84 wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: The age of average

#396

Post by anfelor »

fvdessen wrote: post #358

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 mor…

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.

How could this look different? Consider for example NeueHouse or Soho House from https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/top-coworking-spac...

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.

Re: The age of average

#397

Post by pixl97 »

rfwhyte wrote: post #287
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 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.

What kind of xahfsghihs do you like, and how much time in your life are you willing to spend to find a good one?

Re: The age of average

#398

Post by pixl97 »

mint2 wrote: post #248
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.

Convergence occurs because of the paradox of choice. A market that successfully converges will have happier users and more sales because of it.

Re: The age of average

#399

Post by nine_k »

titzer wrote: post #381
anonymouskimmer wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. 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.

Re: The age of average

#400

Post by nine_k »

bobthepanda wrote: post #371
sirmarksalot wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mo…

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 pr…

Isn't this one of the points that the article is making?
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