Off topic but I really hate modern web design. I found the content of this article interesting but I could hardly read it scrolling through in-article ads, banners, etc. One of the reasons I like HN is the prevalence of personal blogs that just have text for me to sit and read.
If it's any consolation this article was written by an LLM, so reading it is a waste of time regardless. HN should just autoblock this entire scumbag domain.
I use reader mode on most sites where it is possible. It makes a big difference in most cases. Readable font size and face, good contrast, and comfortable margins. I don't know why so many sites ignore good practices on this stuff.
> I use reader mode on most sites where it is possible. ...
That's my go-to solution on mobile devices almost every single time because on small screens even a good adblocker simply isn't nearly enough to overcome the other issues you mention in your comment here.
If you've ever been in an home owned for generations, filled with books and knickknacks and heirlooms and family photos, despite the clutter it all feels comforting in a way that modern decor doesn't.
The article doesn't touch much on why modern decor emerged as it did. It's a market response where everyone needs to (or feels the need to) pick up and move at a moment's notice. Companies are either expanding or like to think they'll be expanding soon. People move jobs so often that they have a hard time feeling settled where they are, so they design for that possibility. The modern aesthetic is one of planned impermanence.
I am skeptical this is the origin of modern decor. The trend away from ornamentation, toward simplicity, flatness, etc in design goes back several generations and transcends interior design.
If the thesis was true, we'd expect rich people who will never be compelled to move against their will, or to move into less space, would prefer cluttered homey interiors, and poor people would prefer sparse & modern. In reality, the biggest boosters of modern decor are rich people.
Travel / multiple homes confuse the issue because nobody spends much time on their 5th house they use less than a month per year, so the decoration is mostly outsourced to 3rd parties.
The portion of rich people homes they actually use are often quite cluttered. The simile limitation of needing to walk to a room to use it means spreading out across a huge home gets annoying. Semi public spaces for guests on the other hand can look like hotels because that’s effectively what they are.
Space is a factor too. I toured the mansion one time a few years back because a friend of mine was remodeling it. The master bedroom was as large as my entire house. That's a single bedroom for the two people planned to live there. I saw it while it was still under construction and so completely unlivable and but you could quickly figure out which parts were intended for the people lived there to live in and which parts were semi-public most of the mansion was clearly public spaces where they would have parties.
This is a false dichotomy. The modern style is a reaction against a distinct and different design aesthetic from what the parent described. Neoclassical, Gothic Revival, and Rococo are more ornamental, but they not cozy or comfortable in the same way.
This being said, the title is accurate to the article but misleading. The subtitle is about "Striped Floors and Flickering LEDs". It isn't modern design, it's specific elements of modern design.
I'd suggest that the striped/patterned floors/LED points transcend styles, and would cause issues even in a more ornate/classical design. Style is individual, and I expect the diversities of brains and thinking patterns means that there is no right answer for what style is best for people.
The most interesting part of the article wasn't really reflective of style, it was visually crowded environments. They used the example of supermarkets, and that seems distinct from a visually rich style like the grandparent comment's home or Neo Gothic cathedrals. Being in a forest is visually crowded, too, but I'd expect it has the opposite effect the study measured. I think the fractal dimension of the detail, if they correlated it with the degree of distress, would be a factor.
Ornate and simple alternate back and forth in a reactionary preference cycle in history. We may be in a 'simple' phase but there is a nostalgic backlash happening with pre-digital aesthetics, and as evidenced here.
Here's the story that made sense to me: In the pre industrial age, visible ornamentation was symbolic of a craftsman's skill and attention to detail, when you couldn't inspect the invisible aspects of a product. For instance a violin has an ornately carved scroll, and features such as the "bees sting," whereas you can't take it apart to see if the neck mortise is precisely fitted. It is one of the few pre-industrial-age products whose aesthetics have not changed much.
Today, those features are no longer necessary, and we look for other measures of quality in products -- for better or worse.
I grew up in a "midcentury modern" house, and my family lives in one today. I find the modern decor to be comforting because in my case it reminds me of home. My mom claimed that the sparse decor was easier to maintain, for instance: "There are no knick-knacks to dust around." Truth be told, the house also happened to be available during a very frothy market, and my spouse would have chosen something more traditional.
It's also claimed that the simpler decor works in smaller houses.
We were not rich. The MCM houses in my 'hood, including ours, are certainly not clutter free, yet still feel pleasant and comfortable.
What are we talking about here? I didn't read the full article but I looked at the synopsis at the top: "Striped patterns, flickering lights, bright glare, and crowded visual environments such as supermarkets"
With the exclusion of striped patterns, this just sounds like a typical over lit commercial environments, probably overhead fluorescent lights, maybe lights and screens running at different refresh rates. That has nothing to do with home decor of any era or culture.
Also I'm guessing the acoustics are consistently horrible in these environments too. Air quality probably sucks too.
With all due respect, if you bought a house during a frothy market, and you use words like “mid-century modern, you are 100% part of the elite class, even if you don’t consider yourself rich. Maybe you are part of the top 10% instead of the top 1%, but that top 10% or 20% is exactly the class I was referring to.
> I am skeptical this is the origin of modern decor. The trend away from ornamentation, toward simplicity, flatness, etc in design goes back several generations and transcends interior design.
You should be. Modernism is an ideological design response: the aesthetics of the machine age and utilitarianism.
OP's opinion is not based on actual design and architecture history and (ironically) appears to be itself an idelogical narrative: a posthoc criticism of Modern (yes with cap M) design which itself has its root in conservative reaction against the (asserted, alleged and possibly true) socialist tendencies of the elite social and design circles that gave birth to Modernism. Note, for example, the 'emotional' appeal to long lived in homes, etc.
I believe in practice yes. It isn't a planned design choice - it's just a practical consequence that if you are moving around a lot, carrying possessions with you has a much higher cost than if you are staying in the same place. You'll be more averse to accumulating possessions. If you are staying in one place, you only have to reduce your possessions when you start running out of space.
If the thesis was true, we'd expect rich people who will never be compelled to move against their will, or to move into less space, would prefer cluttered homey interiors, and poor people would prefer sparse & modern. In reality, the biggest boosters of modern decor are rich people.
Are you sure? Maybe some of them are, but it's also quite typical of rich people to live in a refurbished 19th century home with ornate mouldings, antique furniture, bookshelves, rugs, paintings, and a large amount of carefully curated "clutter". While working-class people almost universally move towards minimalism when they renovate, with the rich it's much more divided.
Very rich people do prefer cluttered homey interiors. The ideal is plush, showy, old, and ostentatious. This is the saloon at Eaton Hall, owned by the Duke of Westminster, one of the richest UK billionaires from one of the oldest families. This particular room isn't particularly cluttered, but the living spaces really aren't minimal at all.
Minimalism is more of an (upper) middle class thing - doctors, lawyers, architects, software developers. The abstraction and clean lines are cool, rational, aspirational, and controlled.
Middle class people on the artier end of the spectrum are more likely to be maximalist, with bright colours, busy wallpapers, huge shelves of books, plants, and such.
Poor people need a lot of stuff because they have to hoard things in case they break. Mass market products are usually low quality, mass-produced from cheap materials, and not very well made.
Working class spaces are often chaotic, claustrophobic (because literally small), full of mismatched items and general clutter.
There's a particular kind of upper working class chrome-and-glass look which is its own attempt at minimalism, but doesn't quite get there. It's still chaotic, the spaces are disorganised, but it's very, very clean and shiny. Instead of feeling controlled and expensive it feels sterile.
The startup office look is a mix of minimalism with some maximalist stylings. It's supposed to be informal and "fun", but the big spaces are disorienting and loud, and the bright colours and lines are distracting.
I had a discussion regarding this some time ago with my grandchild who has an ADHD diagnosis. She has troubles being in noisy (especially visually) environments, yet she finds my home (relatively large home full of books, music always playing etc) comforting. She explained that all this stuff in my home is interesting for her and speaks with her - "It's you and grandma, it's full of stories". But the very modern and "must be comforting" environment in school full of patterns and pictures drawn on walls etc is just irritating – "There is no stories, just noise".
I’m so glad to see someone else who thinks this. Barren walls, vinyl flooring, 5k Kelvin lights, and scented candles everywhere. It’s like the most miserable consumerist environment imaginable.
Very much so. This is why, wherever I move in, I try to put shelvesn on the walls, hang something non-flat off them, put closets and drawer units so that they form a jagged line. Not only are these things functional, they do away with the terrible reverberations that every sound produces otherwise.
The noise on the walls is comforting to people on the autism spectrum, provided it’s bound by inferred structures. You have to also understand that elementary school education is almost universally female, much more so programming is male dominated. Like software, elementary school education is also a pool for adults on the autism spectrum substantially higher than general population average.
My wife is working in preschool and wanted to have some examples to discuss with her. I know plenty of those for overrepresentation of AuDHD spectrum in IT (especially males), but don't know any for schools. Especially since women are often not that obvious.
I don't have statistics. My wife works in elementary special education. Previously to her current assignment to a classroom with assigned students she worked across the entirely of a large school system as adviser.
I have ADHD as well, and this hit the nail on the head. I eventually learned that if I stay in a single environment long enough, it starts to feel less noisy. For example, since I was in my schools alternative program for most of my HS career, I was pretty much in the same classroom every day for ~4 years. Eventually, the stories came to me
The article is about office decor, not home decor. While I don't love "modern decor," I don't think offices are meant to feel comforting like a home owned for generations.
If anything, offices are likely designed to not feel comfortable so you are forced to focus on your screen and work. Otherwise, rooms were more comfortable than cubicles, cubicles were more comfortable than open benches, open benches will be more comfortable than whatever AI-adjacent abomination surely to come...
Really curious to imagine what these AI-adjacent abominations could be. Some sort of people conveyor belt we have to work on while rotating past other humans to achieve maximum 'collaboration' perhaps? Offices built into semi trucks so we get picked up and crammed together with our laptops and screens? When will it stop!
My dad's lived in the same house for over 15 years and probably expected as much when he moved in. He has a room with old books covering the walls, which he never reads. If he moved house every year, he'd have to throw out or donate the collection.
My parents lived in the same house for 40 years, my entire childhood was there. My grandparents (both sets) lived in their hours for 50 years. I can't comprehend how Americans keep moving for jobs or to upgrade or to get to a better school district. Surely you want some permanence? Get to know your neighbors?
I really don't want permanence, no! I start to feel fidgety and uncomfortable after I've spent too many years in one place. The idea of living in a single house for decades on end sounds like a kind of imprisonment.
I am probably more of a nomad at heart than the average American, but perhaps Americans in general have more of a nomadic temperament than the average human.
Getting to know your neighbors can be a mixed bag. Sometimes you make a great new friend: sometimes you have to deal with an obstreperous busybody. It can be nice not having to spend your whole life dealing with the same people and the same conflicts.
Yeah tight communities are blessing, nightmare or both. Good luck with privacy, some people are nosy by default or simply self-centered... weirdos to be polite, gossip, looking down on differences, hard to integrate for newcomers, and one has to conform to unspoken rules, like them or not. Not exactly feeling of proper freedom, is it.
If you get into beef with your neighbor for something which is trivial over long time, now you are stuck with an asshole next door for next 30-50 years.
Its not just US, we moved in Switzerland from very cosmopolitan and international Geneva to small village in wineyards and all this applies at least as much.
Problem is, unless you happen to live in a relatively wealthy neighborhood, even if you stay put your neighbors and community probably won’t so you still won’t have much permanence.
Unless OP speaks Polish, it does appear to be a mispelling of an offensive term.
> In Polish, "Polak" simply means a Polish man (with "Polka" meaning a Polish woman).
> In English, the spelling "Polack" (and its plural "Polacks") is an old borrowing from Polish, but today it is generally considered a derogatory or offensive ethnic slur for Polish people
You describe it like it’s some kind of a treadmill chasing new. But if you have kids at 35, they start school when you’re 40.. were you thinking about the quality of the neighborhood schools when you bought your house at 25?
Lay down roots, be part of a community, have meaningful connections.
My parents live in southern Italy, in the same small town my mother is from and the small town my father is from is like 5-6 km far.
Every time there is some kind of event (eg: somebody’s parents passing away) it so hearth-warming to see people come together and try and be close to people they’ve known all their life (60+ years).
I moved to a large town nowadays for work and i have a bunch of superficial connections, my peers lament pretty much the same.
I can see why somebody would like to stay 40 years in the same place.
Oftentimes the impermanence is for a chance of that later permanence. Some people do achieve it, but with the economy and world as a whole right now it's becoming rarer to be able to settle down somewhere
> It's a market response where everyone needs to (or feels the need to) pick up and move at a moment's notice.
Yes, but it's deeper than that. Two broad reasons, though your point here is a good one.
1. We don't, particularly in the west, have the skills, shops/craftsmen, or access to resources to make things like we used to. It's a positive network effect where prices go up, folks don't do the work anymore, and so prices go up, and things get more unaffordable, and so forth until there's only a handful of folks anywhere that can build the furniture, decor, or houses that you allude to. Companies can't make this stuff and as they chase never ending globalized supply chains and increasingly fewer commodities or natural resources they market and sell plainer and plainer things - modernist styles and modernist architecture. With so many people in the world competing for the same products and resources, it's incredibly expensive to build anything "real" or with much detail or thought. So companies just cheap out and create surrogate products which nobody is ever happy with.
2. The changes we see in style can be attributed to changes in politics and civilization. Who we are and what we think of ourselves. It's bad or even politically dangerous to build ornate buildings or purchase expensive or ornate pieces for your home. How could you build a beautiful building when there are people starving?!?! (you see a version of this with rocket companies - how can Jeff Bezos spend his money launching rockets when Social Security is underfunded!!?!?)
Any sufficiently famous building or person who liked nice shit was a "colonizer" and "bad person" in some form or because of some argument and then of course over time folks just hide their wealth (stealth wealth, millionaire next door) and we pride ourselves on appearing poor, acting poor, and naturally, we create poor civilizations without much to aspire to. When was the last time you wore a suit and tie? Better yet, who in your town can even make a suit? Who is going to die for strip malls and parking lots? Who wants to invest in their neighborhood when you know instinctively it's just a house and it's not something you will really pass down to your children (they will just sell that suburban home you have). Americans in particular spend thousands annually to travel to countries in Europe for example, and to visit their gardens and nice buildings, which themselves are vestiges of an age when western civilization aspired to more, and why do they only do that instead of investing in their own gardens and making their own nice places for people to visit? We do this of course to some extent - it's big country after all, but those who understand this and why it's important are fewer and further between.
The first point is solid. The loss of craftsmanship means that the labor cost of those who remain has skyrocketed. That's an irony of devaluing labor is that those who hold on to their craft end up in very high demand.
That said, you overestimate how much "colonizer" discourse informs the average suburban home or modern office environment. That discourse isn't even particularly dominant amongst the left (often clowned as "third-worldist", reductionist or class denialism).
The average leftists apartment or home has more in common with your great-grandfather's house than stark, modern minimalism.
The "colonizer" rhetoric is just part of it, but it's more so as a piece of the puzzle that shows of an overall change in how we perceive ourselves and how we report on things in the public sphere.
It's unquestionable that ostentatious displays of wealth are met with revulsion and derision, therefore we don't show those displays. The downstream impact is that the masses have nothing to aspire to or look up to in this specific context of craftsmanship. Again, when was the last time "you" wore a suit? Was it tailored? Do you only wear it at weddings? Do you buy your clothing from Costco/Kirkland? Do you find yourself in the fast food line at Chik-fil-a or driving across town to Buc-ee's in your Jeep? These kinds of consumerist behaviors are good and accepted. If you tell someone you only eat at tasting menus or high end restaurants or something instead of those being celebrated as good you'll be met with incredulity or even be made fun of "you're so fancy" "ugh if only I could afford that", and then it devolves into mass-market "experiences" and so forth.
Because Wimbledon is today, how many complain about the players being required to wear all-white? How many have complained once the champion's dance was re-established? Do you think it's silly or stupid? You're part of the problem! It's considered classism - but without it, you get sterilization. Reduction to the lowest common denominator.
In general, leftist ideologies, so think communism and other sympathies, result in minimalist architecture and decor and art, because grand displays of wealth or even the concept of "rank" with respect to members of society evoke royalty, "white European male", and "let them eat cake". To flaunt your wealth or aspire to be part of a country club or to invent new social organizations and elite activities is to be on the receiving end of the social hammer. You can't have nice stuff because that goes against the doctrine. I'm painting in broad strokes here, but I think this is accurate. It's no accident that all of the best buildings were built under royalist regimes, monarchies, and more.
And because of the disgust and vitriol and crabs pulling other crabs down as they try to escape the bucket, now we are just left with wealthy losers who have forgotten their noblesse oblige.
> That discourse isn't even particularly dominant amongst the left (often clowned as "third-worldist", reductionist or class denialism).
I think this is just flatly false. You've probably just seen it so much and it has become so common to you that you've become less sensitive to it. Leftists in particular are very in-tune with class warfare. I saw a bumper sticker the other day that said, and I'm paraphrasing, culture wars are a distraction from the real war, class war. I see stuff like this all the time: https://www.amazon.com/American-Magnet-War-Class-Text/dp/B09... .
> If anything, suit is boring minimalist choice, every man looks exactly like the man next to him.
It's less about the suit itself - I don't mean to imply everyone should wear the same thing. It's about the perception around it and the moaning one does when it comes to trying to present yourself in society. There's a "I don't need to impress anyone" attitude, which I'm certainly sympathetic to, but I think it is heading in the wrong direction.
It's like when you talk to a pickleball player and you ask them if they play tennis. The typical answer is "no" "that's so hard" "too much running" - it's the undercurrent of not trying and not having high standards that I take issue with. (Nothing against pickleball, truly)
People wear stuff to impress others without wearing suits. Suits are not even impressive looking as everyone looks the same. People feel uncomfortable and out of place in them for a host of reasons, but "I don't want to be impressive" is a rare one.
I really do not associate suits with anything you wrote here - they dont make you impressive, they dont show personalization or care about how you look like, they are just a thing you put on in rare social situation and then you feel hot. An average metal guy with a big hairstyle is putting a lot more effort into looking impressive then someone who just wears the suit.
> It's like when you talk to a pickleball player and you ask them if they play tennis. The typical answer is "no" "that's so hard" "too much running" - it's the undercurrent of not trying and not having high standards that I take issue with. (Nothing against pickleball, truly)
Is that an actual thing pickleball players and fans say or something you projected on them, because they don't play the proper tennis? Why the need to turn casual sport and exercise into a test of will and standards?
I just dont get this example either. Why is it wrong to pick a sport you can play with friends right away, have fun and then stick to it?
> Suits are not even impressive looking as everyone looks the same.
You're focusing too much on the suit itself and that's causing you to miss the point.
The suit is just traditional western social attire born from military uniforms. If our traditional attire was the metal guy with big hairstyle, I'd just use that here instead. The point is trying (which of course as a death metal lover I would think the metal guy with the big hairstyle is cool) and that's what so many seem to have given up on. Wearing PJs to Wal-Mart is the decline, not the cool metal haircut.
> Is that an actual thing pickleball players and fans say or something you projected on them, because they don't play the proper tennis? Why the need to turn casual sport and exercise into a test of will and standards?
Yes, it is actual things I hear from pickleball players and my friends who play. Again though you missed the point. I think it's great that folks have fun playing pickleball or any other sport. It's not any worse or better than tennis or any other sport. The problem is the mentality from folks I've talked to. "Tennis is too hard" "Too much running". It's self-limiting, and it's an aversion to doing hard things.
That's a civilizational and social challenge we must root out.
The "leftist ideology" in women leads to colorful hair because not only is it cool looking, but it keeps away the kind of men who are repulsed by things like womens rights
In theory, yes. In practice it's just used as an epithet against specific groups. For instance, you almost never hear folks from South America being called colonizers despite how Spain and Portugal carved up that continent, meanwhile Jews are frequently called colonizers of their own ancestral homeland.
> It's a market response where everyone needs to (or feels the need to) pick up and move at a moment's notice.
You see the same thing with cars. People choose to buy (or more commonly lease!) a car for a few years and before they've even decided to buy it they're planning to sell it. This is why there are so many sad grey cars on the road - pick a colour that's easy to sell! Don't get anything too wild, it might not sell! What if you can't sell it because it's red or blue?!!? Don't go too crazy with that very pale blue tinted grey, they might not be able to sell it for as much and you won't get much from the leasing company!
There's a guy in my town who has a Porsche 992, it's only a few years old. He bought it as his retirement present to himself when he packed in his job at the start of COVID. It has all the options, and it has custom paint.
It is what I can only describe as Budget-Conscious Prosthetic Limb beige.
That kind of pinky-beige colour for NHS hearing aid plastic.
It cost him 1500 quid to even get it mixed, thousands extra to have it sprayed that colour.
"But what if it doesn't sell?" people say to him, "What if people don't like the colour?"
He doesn't care, he's going to drive it for the rest of his life. It'll be someone else's problem to sell once he dies.
I'm told that because so many cars are the ugly gray that cars have color are selling better nowadays. It may be only a minority that won't color, but that minority is willing to pay for it and they look at their choices and your car is the only one they can go for.
I don't normally care about color myself, but I hate thr color my car is enough that I'm wondering if I should spend the several couple thousand dollars to put a decent coat of paint on it.
I don't need to drive, luckily, but I heard that cars cost so much these days that you really have to be planning to get back as much money as possible. Cars cost what shitty houses used to cost, even adjusted for inflation.
A 911 is sort of an exception to the rule. 95%+ of 911s are custom ordered by vs a common brand where the manufacturer is making them in batches with common colors/options for dealerships.
Even farther on the spectrum is Lamborghini where 100% are all custom made. You can't buy one from a dealership [new] that hasn't been custom ordered.
Someone will buy that 911 if/when he decides to sell it and have no problems getting a good price.
> The article doesn't touch much on why modern decor emerged as it did
The theory I subscribe to is a few fold:
1) People like to buy "generic" homes that are easier to renovate/personalize
2) But then they don't end up personalizing, because they're afraid to tank it's market value
3) Thus homes stay boring and generic
A lot of the new designs are actually practical.... be it striped carpets or patterned bus seats, they're designed to hide stains and wear. If eg. bus seats were made from white fabric, no one would want to sit in them after a month or two of use, same for eg. carpets in places with many people.
I see strange market forces where companies need to be trendy, so they absorb what's in the air, and then people kinda have no choice but to buy it. Nobody really wanted to but it materializes.
Around me every house now has tall anthracite fully closed fences. It's gloomy as hell, streets went from cute garden with wood fences to lock-down mode in a few years. It's all the same model, all the same vibe..
A home you inhabit for a long time molds to your day-to-day life. The objects you surround yourself with are not a design choice, but a series of practical solutions to everyday problems. A house becomes a home when you absent-mindedly put down your favourite teacup, and it falls on the coaster you put there five years ago. There's a pillow that makes your reading chair fit just right. The art on the walls was curated over years.
Modern decor is what happens when you just go on Pinterest and outsource taste for a place you don't own and don't expect to live in for long.
I help immigrants move to Germany, and I often say that they only get to feel home once they can put their own frames on their walls. This means that they can finallt invest in the space they occupy, and fully inhabit it.
On the other hand, I do think selecting some things purely for design reasons makes things better. A random knicknack you don't need but fits aesthetically is good. Also, selecting things you know you need like furniture to fit a specific style is good if you the style brings you joy
It is old money v new money. Old money has things. If they want to go skiing, they have a set of skis in the garage and a family cabin near the slopes. If they want to go fishing, they have a boat ready on a trailer. New money isnt about having thing but having power to acquire, to congure up things as needed. New money doesn't own skis. New money rents them. New money doesnt have a boat parked behind thier garage, they have an empty (minimalist) garage and will buy a boat a month before the trip, having it delivered to the lake by someone who owns work gloves. Old money collects a household of things over decades. New money leaves a trail of discarded junk that was used once and disposed of shortly thereafter.
Victimhood par excellence: "My brain is a 200+ IQ machine desperately waiting for input. However, I cannot feed it! It is the walls, I guess."
It should be legally enforced to place every author's smartphone usage statistics into such articles. No interior design on earth can compensate for 40 hours TikTok usage per week.
And we didn't mention other streaming services as well.
It might be the smartphone usage as well as time spend.
Depends on your perspective. Yes I grew up with that type of decor, but it doesn't comfort me today because all I can think of are all the knocks and crannies where dust and pollen doesn't get cleaned out of.
The Limitations section at the bottom certainly has a lot of limitations:
> This paper is a review, meaning it synthesizes and interprets existing research rather than presenting new experimental data. The authors themselves note that current visual tests for susceptibility to discomfort are subjective and poorly standardized. They also acknowledge that the proposed mechanism (that discomfort is the brain’s response to overwork) has not been fully tested, particularly the hypothesis that colored tints reduce discomfort by steering visual stimulation away from overactive brain areas. The relationship between the brain’s excitatory and inhibitory chemical signals and visual discomfort also remains, in their words, “unsettled.” Several key research questions are flagged as unresolved, including how to best quantify the real-world impact of visual stress on people’s lives and how to objectively measure susceptibility.
Flickering lights are about the only thing I saw in here that seem like they'd be a problem in the long term. Everything else your brain just adjusts to over time and stops noticing. Maybe the first few days in an office with bright colors would be slightly distracting, but after that you just stop seeing them. I would guess that a lot of the studies they reviewed probably tested people's reactions to these things when they saw them one time, not the hundredth time.
I think there were studies on this, leading to, among other things, painting control rooms seafoam green to reduce visual fatigue. This implies that people don't simply adjust (or that the studies were too limited).
>Eyes and brain alike evolved over millennia to process natural scenes, forests, rivers, coastlines, open skies. These environments share a specific mathematical pattern: their visual complexity decreases predictably as you zoom in on finer and finer details.
Wut? It's precisely the opposite. Natural patterns have infinite complexity as you zoom in, and human-made patterns (most often) not.
I’m pretty sure they mean perceptible complexity at the level of the human eye. Of course, everything has quarks and leptons in infinitely complex patterning.
Our brains evolved in the former environment, and is very good at filtering it out. I've got pretty extreme ADHD, and if I'm in a room and something on the wall is flittering about, I absolutely must look at it. If I'm in a field and a tree is full of leaves billowing in the wind, it's a nice background thing. I guess my monkey brain is too busy looking for tiger faces to be distracted by flickering leaves, flowing grass, and flying bugs for more than a half second.
I dunno if I agree with their arguments in the paper (there seem to be some pretty big questions unanswered yet, which the authors acknowledge), but there's definitely something to the idea that natural environments aren't as stressful for us, even if they're objectively "busier".
Yeah, "shockingly" the LLM summary has it wrong. The paper is really focusing on luminance contrast: the variation in contrast within a natural object tends to be narrower than the variation between objects, and the neural metabolism of our visual system tends to be optimized towards a natural range of contrasts. Modern high-contrast decor and lighting can be exhausting.
The default visual circuits in our brains may have evolved to optimally handle fractal patterns and textures. Straight lines, geometrical figures and featureless surfaces may require activation of less optimal circuits. Anecdotally, I find being in environments made of featureless geometrical figures uncomfortable to be in.
I‘ve definitely noticed this over time as spaces (especially public ones like cafes, retail locations, and restaurants) started being designed as props for Instagram/TikTok.
This made a big contribution because vertical short-form video feeds require extreme stimuli to get anyone’s attention - but they add nothing to the actual experience and often detract from it.
This has also led to tue absolutely horrific acoustics where even in non-nightclub bars and normal restaurants, you have to yell to understand each other because the decor is made of tile, tables and chairs are at odd angles that increase distance, etc.
Everything now is subordinate to the visual environment because that’s what gets shared on Instagram.
Not saying interior design doesn’t matter, but its point should be to create a great overall experience, not to be visually stimulating at the expense of the rest.
I don’t buy this. Feels like a non-problem or a very first world problem to even analyse and with the exception of lights, nothing else seemed plausible
Really, you don't find it plausible that environment could affect mood?
I dont know if the hypothesis in the paper is correct, but it seems clear that environment can affect mood in some cases. There is a reason why night clubs and libraries are decorated differently. From there it seems very plausible other elements of environments could have an affect (perhaps subtle) on mood.
I really hate shops, malls and supermarkets. I'm not easily overwhelmed and can handle being there fine. But it's just horrible there. Way too loud, bright and often too warm. Completely full of chaos and way too many useless products.
When I have to go I try to be out there as quickly as possible. I always thought that's weird, shouldn't those shops be designed in a way that makes me want to explore them, look at all the things they have, instead of just hunting down exactly what I need and leave as quickly as possible.
They make it hard to find what you want on purpose in hopes you will be distracted and buy other crap along the way. I think it must work on most consumers.
I get that they make it hard to find, so we also buy different stuff. But if I can't find what I'm looking for too often, I won't come back anymore.
Sometimes I really want/need something, and I have all the stores close by. But I still decide to buy it online, and accept waiting a few days, because stores/malls are such a bad experience.
Whenever I go shopping for a single, most trivial item, I really need to psyche myself up. Those critical moments just upon entering the store are the key.
Because immediately upon walking in the door, you are immersed in a "shopping environment". Everything you smell, hear, see, touch is geared to making you spend more and purchase more and grab more useless stuff off the shelves.
Even in a Goodwill or similar thrift store you are subjected to these merchandising tricks.
I have found that keeping a very good household inventory on a spreadsheet is critical. If I have this spreadsheet on my phone and I refer to it, before venturing into aisles, then I know exactly what I need to purchase, and where to go to find it. Sticking to the shopping list, I can avoid the needless purchase temptations.
At Costco when I'd go with my parents, it was the custom of the cashiers to ask, "did you find everything alright?" and my father would always joke, that if enough people answered in the affirmative, that was their cue to rearrange the store and shuffle everything around, so that shoppers would get lost, and not being able to find what they want, would discover more useless stuff that they would pull off the shelves on impulse.
It also doesn't hurt to follow the advice of "never shop while hungry"!
Supermarkets are maybe a bit different, they are hard to avoid.
But I dislike malls so much, that I only get new clothes for example once it's really necessary. If it was more pleasant to shop there, I would probably buy more stuff.
I guess there are some people who fit into that environment, their tactics work well on them, and the shops/malls just ignore customers like me.
Supermarkets are abundant near me, and vary wildly in their experiences.
I could shop at a Wal-Mart or a Target for groceries, and thus be subject to all the same big-box shopping pitfalls.
I could shop at a farmers market style grocery store, and the major one near me has some great products and great foods, but mixed in with 90% ultra-processed foods, sugar bombs, and all sorts of unhealthy stuff, masquerading as organic or natural food. Also this "farmers market" has an extensive section with wine and beer, and personal health/hygiene products that are quite expensive.
At Trader Joe's I usually have no problem shopping for exactly what I need, and again, sticking to my spreadsheet with inventory and shopping needs. I usually pick up some fresh flowers here, because they're a bargain, and the coolest thing about Trader Joe's is that I can trust basically any product they've put on their shelves, and the limited selection, and restriction to food products only, helps narrow my shopping focus.
It is even possible to shop for groceries at the dollar stores nearby, which stock a lot of frozen foods, snack foods, beverages, etc. These bargain prices are generally justified by a lower bar of quality, or rapid expiration dates.
Another "grocery shopping" option is pharmacies or convenience stores. There is a major chain pharmacy nearby that really has a lot of good groceries, and is starting to stock some organic and natural brands as well. Its aisles are impeccable and the shopping experience is first-rate. Of course, as soon as I step in the door, the scent and sounds and feels assault me and begin to work on my consumer brain. Got to adhere firmly to that spreadsheet in my pocket!
i think theres something in peoples mindset or genetics that creates this difference. my experience is like the opposite of yours. i dont exactly love malls but its one of the things that can satisfy the part of my brain that just wants more.
never been diagnosed with adhd but i have this thing where most of life is not stimulating enough to keep me interested. to be clear this is not a screen addiction, i dont feel specific pressure to pull up my phone and i can go a long time without it. scrolling is only a fallback when im not talking with someone (that includes writing like right now), working on something interesting, outside with friends, playing games, working out, you get the idea.
creative things like coding and drawing almost always work. movies and football only if i care about it emotionally. alcohol helps some too. but a lot of activities like reading a book are just not enough. i would describe it as a non specific addiction to something that might be dopamine but that still wouldnt fully explain things.
when i go to the mall or the shopping street or a bar theres so much going on that i finally feel comfortable. on the other hand i almost never feel overwhelmed. my family is not like that (they absolutely hate shopping) but i think some of my friends are, never asked them about it. i dont know if its a type of neurodivergence or a learned behavior or something even stranger.
But isn't that actually what modernism is about? I heard about Ornament and Crime in a university liberal arts class, and there really is this kind of problem. When you try to imitate natural forms, fractal structures are fundamentally difficult to mass produce, there are hygiene issues, and so the modernist approach became dominant. And as the saying goes, "form follows function", you cannot apply the artificial technologies that do not exist in nature the same way you would with old stone buildings.
In the same vein, contemporary art, like a Veronica, smashes form apart, and instead of concrete imitation of nature, it moves toward abstraction, geometry, and minimalism. But does not that come with a problem? It does not enter the brain directly the way natural forms do; you have to additionally recognize what it actually is. I do not think that is an incorrect observation.
I really hate lighting in modern offices. If there was one thing that folks actively worked to improve I would choose lighting. Having lights with a broader spectrum would go a long way in reducing eye strain and general fatigue, while likely allowing the lights to actually be brighter. Unfortunately I don't see this changing anytime soon.
I so agree! As someone into photography, light is everything. It can even turn oversaturated fabrics into more uniform and less screaming colors. The diffusion of the light flattens things, but the interesting angles create interesting shadows and shapes. So much can be done with light, but so many offices have the boring flat ceiling lights. It seems to be hard for the office space designers to invest a bit of time into islands that can have lamps. What's interesting is that many libraries seem to be more accomodating in this regard.
Either way, light is everything, but it is treated like an afterthought.
It's not just decor but architecture as well. Look I've been to Europe, I've seen the old architecture and decor there. It's unquestionably better. I get the feeling that modernity, at least in this day and age is about cost cutting and non-offensiveness more than anything else.
The degree to which an environment is straining is possibly merely coincidentally related to the decor part.. and almost entirely rooted in architecture. Buildings with terrible architecture merely tend to simultaneously also be equipped with horrible color and texture choices.
I suspect besides objectively annoying flickering lights, the difference is primarily made in the immediate, subconscious and effortless recognition of ubiquitous patterns of function. Which happens in form and proportion first, and only to a lesser degree in color and contrast.
* this is the floor, this is the ceiling
* through there, there is the entrance / exit
* this is a reception desk
If it takes effort to filter out the noise, the glare to know such simple things, there is less capacity left in our brains to process other "essentially free" tasks.
Similarly, one my uni professors wrote a paper arguing that the opposite - standing in nature - results in healthy neural activity.
He showed people photos of geometric patterns (plain lines, basic shapes), natural patterns (fractals), and photos of nature itself (trees, animals, etc.) while reading their mental activity. The conclusion was that both fractals and nature photos cause significantly more efficient, diverse, and healthy-looking brain activity. Our brains inherently expect the world to look fractal-like, and in some ways even need it to look that way to form creative thoughts.
Completely lost the link to that article; it was a good read.
Considering the article's definition, pretty funny that this was my first result on Google when looking up "modern decor":
> Modern decor is an interior design style that emerged in the early-to-mid 20th century, rooted in the Bauhaus movement. It is defined by "form following function," clean lines, open-concept floor plans, uncluttered spaces, and a warm, neutral color palette.
> Key traits of modern decor include:
> Clean Lines: A heavy emphasis on sleek, horizontal, and vertical lines without fussy ornamentation, curves, or intricate trim.
> Natural Materials: Frequent use of exposed wood, leather, steel, glass, and concrete to highlight natural beauty.
> Minimalist Furniture: Low-profile, simple furniture shapes. The philosophy revolves around "less is more," relying on intentional, high-impact pieces rather than crowding a space.
> Neutral Colors: Earthy tones, whites, beiges, grays, and monochromatic schemes dominate to create a calm, balanced environment.
> Abundant Light: Maximizing natural light through large windows and open spaces rather than relying heavily on dense window treatments.
The stripey wood-and-black-rubber 'sound dampening' panels are all the rage these days and I don't really understand it.
Our management had the bright idea to put these things in all our meeting rooms on the wall with the TVs we use for remote calls. People started getting sea sick looking at them. Of course removing them would mean the management made a mistake, so they will stay there until the next bright idea hits.
I cannot thank you and GP (and others in this thread) enough for these comments. I thought they looked cool (although a bit of dust-catchers) and was planning to redo my bedroom with those.
I'm definitely going to do something else instead.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 76.7 ms ] threadThe paper itself is open access: https://www.mdpi.com/2411-5150/10/2/34
That's my go-to solution on mobile devices almost every single time because on small screens even a good adblocker simply isn't nearly enough to overcome the other issues you mention in your comment here.
The article doesn't touch much on why modern decor emerged as it did. It's a market response where everyone needs to (or feels the need to) pick up and move at a moment's notice. Companies are either expanding or like to think they'll be expanding soon. People move jobs so often that they have a hard time feeling settled where they are, so they design for that possibility. The modern aesthetic is one of planned impermanence.
If the thesis was true, we'd expect rich people who will never be compelled to move against their will, or to move into less space, would prefer cluttered homey interiors, and poor people would prefer sparse & modern. In reality, the biggest boosters of modern decor are rich people.
The portion of rich people homes they actually use are often quite cluttered. The simile limitation of needing to walk to a room to use it means spreading out across a huge home gets annoying. Semi public spaces for guests on the other hand can look like hotels because that’s effectively what they are.
This being said, the title is accurate to the article but misleading. The subtitle is about "Striped Floors and Flickering LEDs". It isn't modern design, it's specific elements of modern design.
I'd suggest that the striped/patterned floors/LED points transcend styles, and would cause issues even in a more ornate/classical design. Style is individual, and I expect the diversities of brains and thinking patterns means that there is no right answer for what style is best for people.
The most interesting part of the article wasn't really reflective of style, it was visually crowded environments. They used the example of supermarkets, and that seems distinct from a visually rich style like the grandparent comment's home or Neo Gothic cathedrals. Being in a forest is visually crowded, too, but I'd expect it has the opposite effect the study measured. I think the fractal dimension of the detail, if they correlated it with the degree of distress, would be a factor.
Today, those features are no longer necessary, and we look for other measures of quality in products -- for better or worse.
I grew up in a "midcentury modern" house, and my family lives in one today. I find the modern decor to be comforting because in my case it reminds me of home. My mom claimed that the sparse decor was easier to maintain, for instance: "There are no knick-knacks to dust around." Truth be told, the house also happened to be available during a very frothy market, and my spouse would have chosen something more traditional.
It's also claimed that the simpler decor works in smaller houses.
We were not rich. The MCM houses in my 'hood, including ours, are certainly not clutter free, yet still feel pleasant and comfortable.
With the exclusion of striped patterns, this just sounds like a typical over lit commercial environments, probably overhead fluorescent lights, maybe lights and screens running at different refresh rates. That has nothing to do with home decor of any era or culture.
Also I'm guessing the acoustics are consistently horrible in these environments too. Air quality probably sucks too.
You should be. Modernism is an ideological design response: the aesthetics of the machine age and utilitarianism.
OP's opinion is not based on actual design and architecture history and (ironically) appears to be itself an idelogical narrative: a posthoc criticism of Modern (yes with cap M) design which itself has its root in conservative reaction against the (asserted, alleged and possibly true) socialist tendencies of the elite social and design circles that gave birth to Modernism. Note, for example, the 'emotional' appeal to long lived in homes, etc.
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20230103-the-historical-...
Are you sure? Maybe some of them are, but it's also quite typical of rich people to live in a refurbished 19th century home with ornate mouldings, antique furniture, bookshelves, rugs, paintings, and a large amount of carefully curated "clutter". While working-class people almost universally move towards minimalism when they renovate, with the rich it's much more divided.
I walked past a bank later and it looked almost exactly the same. (I guess that's where the money is!)
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS0H4Sp...
Minimalism is more of an (upper) middle class thing - doctors, lawyers, architects, software developers. The abstraction and clean lines are cool, rational, aspirational, and controlled.
Middle class people on the artier end of the spectrum are more likely to be maximalist, with bright colours, busy wallpapers, huge shelves of books, plants, and such.
Poor people need a lot of stuff because they have to hoard things in case they break. Mass market products are usually low quality, mass-produced from cheap materials, and not very well made.
Working class spaces are often chaotic, claustrophobic (because literally small), full of mismatched items and general clutter.
There's a particular kind of upper working class chrome-and-glass look which is its own attempt at minimalism, but doesn't quite get there. It's still chaotic, the spaces are disorganised, but it's very, very clean and shiny. Instead of feeling controlled and expensive it feels sterile.
The startup office look is a mix of minimalism with some maximalist stylings. It's supposed to be informal and "fun", but the big spaces are disorienting and loud, and the bright colours and lines are distracting.
The repeating patterns on carpet are an artifact of mass production.
Some small dining rooms amplify all the worst noises and make it terrible to be in, drains your mental battery like few other things.
Interesting! Do you have a source for this?
My dad's lived in the same house for over 15 years and probably expected as much when he moved in. He has a room with old books covering the walls, which he never reads. If he moved house every year, he'd have to throw out or donate the collection.
I am probably more of a nomad at heart than the average American, but perhaps Americans in general have more of a nomadic temperament than the average human.
Getting to know your neighbors can be a mixed bag. Sometimes you make a great new friend: sometimes you have to deal with an obstreperous busybody. It can be nice not having to spend your whole life dealing with the same people and the same conflicts.
If you get into beef with your neighbor for something which is trivial over long time, now you are stuck with an asshole next door for next 30-50 years.
Its not just US, we moved in Switzerland from very cosmopolitan and international Geneva to small village in wineyards and all this applies at least as much.
> and polaks
> In Polish, "Polak" simply means a Polish man (with "Polka" meaning a Polish woman).
> In English, the spelling "Polack" (and its plural "Polacks") is an old borrowing from Polish, but today it is generally considered a derogatory or offensive ethnic slur for Polish people
My parents live in southern Italy, in the same small town my mother is from and the small town my father is from is like 5-6 km far.
Every time there is some kind of event (eg: somebody’s parents passing away) it so hearth-warming to see people come together and try and be close to people they’ve known all their life (60+ years).
I moved to a large town nowadays for work and i have a bunch of superficial connections, my peers lament pretty much the same.
I can see why somebody would like to stay 40 years in the same place.
I expect society is best with a mix of both types of people. It usually is.
Yes, but it's deeper than that. Two broad reasons, though your point here is a good one.
1. We don't, particularly in the west, have the skills, shops/craftsmen, or access to resources to make things like we used to. It's a positive network effect where prices go up, folks don't do the work anymore, and so prices go up, and things get more unaffordable, and so forth until there's only a handful of folks anywhere that can build the furniture, decor, or houses that you allude to. Companies can't make this stuff and as they chase never ending globalized supply chains and increasingly fewer commodities or natural resources they market and sell plainer and plainer things - modernist styles and modernist architecture. With so many people in the world competing for the same products and resources, it's incredibly expensive to build anything "real" or with much detail or thought. So companies just cheap out and create surrogate products which nobody is ever happy with.
2. The changes we see in style can be attributed to changes in politics and civilization. Who we are and what we think of ourselves. It's bad or even politically dangerous to build ornate buildings or purchase expensive or ornate pieces for your home. How could you build a beautiful building when there are people starving?!?! (you see a version of this with rocket companies - how can Jeff Bezos spend his money launching rockets when Social Security is underfunded!!?!?)
Any sufficiently famous building or person who liked nice shit was a "colonizer" and "bad person" in some form or because of some argument and then of course over time folks just hide their wealth (stealth wealth, millionaire next door) and we pride ourselves on appearing poor, acting poor, and naturally, we create poor civilizations without much to aspire to. When was the last time you wore a suit and tie? Better yet, who in your town can even make a suit? Who is going to die for strip malls and parking lots? Who wants to invest in their neighborhood when you know instinctively it's just a house and it's not something you will really pass down to your children (they will just sell that suburban home you have). Americans in particular spend thousands annually to travel to countries in Europe for example, and to visit their gardens and nice buildings, which themselves are vestiges of an age when western civilization aspired to more, and why do they only do that instead of investing in their own gardens and making their own nice places for people to visit? We do this of course to some extent - it's big country after all, but those who understand this and why it's important are fewer and further between.
That said, you overestimate how much "colonizer" discourse informs the average suburban home or modern office environment. That discourse isn't even particularly dominant amongst the left (often clowned as "third-worldist", reductionist or class denialism).
The average leftists apartment or home has more in common with your great-grandfather's house than stark, modern minimalism.
It's unquestionable that ostentatious displays of wealth are met with revulsion and derision, therefore we don't show those displays. The downstream impact is that the masses have nothing to aspire to or look up to in this specific context of craftsmanship. Again, when was the last time "you" wore a suit? Was it tailored? Do you only wear it at weddings? Do you buy your clothing from Costco/Kirkland? Do you find yourself in the fast food line at Chik-fil-a or driving across town to Buc-ee's in your Jeep? These kinds of consumerist behaviors are good and accepted. If you tell someone you only eat at tasting menus or high end restaurants or something instead of those being celebrated as good you'll be met with incredulity or even be made fun of "you're so fancy" "ugh if only I could afford that", and then it devolves into mass-market "experiences" and so forth.
Because Wimbledon is today, how many complain about the players being required to wear all-white? How many have complained once the champion's dance was re-established? Do you think it's silly or stupid? You're part of the problem! It's considered classism - but without it, you get sterilization. Reduction to the lowest common denominator.
In general, leftist ideologies, so think communism and other sympathies, result in minimalist architecture and decor and art, because grand displays of wealth or even the concept of "rank" with respect to members of society evoke royalty, "white European male", and "let them eat cake". To flaunt your wealth or aspire to be part of a country club or to invent new social organizations and elite activities is to be on the receiving end of the social hammer. You can't have nice stuff because that goes against the doctrine. I'm painting in broad strokes here, but I think this is accurate. It's no accident that all of the best buildings were built under royalist regimes, monarchies, and more.
And because of the disgust and vitriol and crabs pulling other crabs down as they try to escape the bucket, now we are just left with wealthy losers who have forgotten their noblesse oblige.
> That discourse isn't even particularly dominant amongst the left (often clowned as "third-worldist", reductionist or class denialism).
I think this is just flatly false. You've probably just seen it so much and it has become so common to you that you've become less sensitive to it. Leftists in particular are very in-tune with class warfare. I saw a bumper sticker the other day that said, and I'm paraphrasing, culture wars are a distraction from the real war, class war. I see stuff like this all the time: https://www.amazon.com/American-Magnet-War-Class-Text/dp/B09... .
If anything, suit is boring minimalist choice, every man looks exactly like the man next to him.
The leftist ideology in women leads to colorful hair styles, even more variety of clothing cause they integrate in unusual styles.
It's less about the suit itself - I don't mean to imply everyone should wear the same thing. It's about the perception around it and the moaning one does when it comes to trying to present yourself in society. There's a "I don't need to impress anyone" attitude, which I'm certainly sympathetic to, but I think it is heading in the wrong direction.
It's like when you talk to a pickleball player and you ask them if they play tennis. The typical answer is "no" "that's so hard" "too much running" - it's the undercurrent of not trying and not having high standards that I take issue with. (Nothing against pickleball, truly)
I really do not associate suits with anything you wrote here - they dont make you impressive, they dont show personalization or care about how you look like, they are just a thing you put on in rare social situation and then you feel hot. An average metal guy with a big hairstyle is putting a lot more effort into looking impressive then someone who just wears the suit.
> It's like when you talk to a pickleball player and you ask them if they play tennis. The typical answer is "no" "that's so hard" "too much running" - it's the undercurrent of not trying and not having high standards that I take issue with. (Nothing against pickleball, truly)
Is that an actual thing pickleball players and fans say or something you projected on them, because they don't play the proper tennis? Why the need to turn casual sport and exercise into a test of will and standards?
I just dont get this example either. Why is it wrong to pick a sport you can play with friends right away, have fun and then stick to it?
You're focusing too much on the suit itself and that's causing you to miss the point.
The suit is just traditional western social attire born from military uniforms. If our traditional attire was the metal guy with big hairstyle, I'd just use that here instead. The point is trying (which of course as a death metal lover I would think the metal guy with the big hairstyle is cool) and that's what so many seem to have given up on. Wearing PJs to Wal-Mart is the decline, not the cool metal haircut.
> Is that an actual thing pickleball players and fans say or something you projected on them, because they don't play the proper tennis? Why the need to turn casual sport and exercise into a test of will and standards?
Yes, it is actual things I hear from pickleball players and my friends who play. Again though you missed the point. I think it's great that folks have fun playing pickleball or any other sport. It's not any worse or better than tennis or any other sport. The problem is the mentality from folks I've talked to. "Tennis is too hard" "Too much running". It's self-limiting, and it's an aversion to doing hard things.
That's a civilizational and social challenge we must root out.
It’s worse than that, most consumers don’t even know what good looks like any more. We are much more restricted and maybe lower variety of experience.
You could serve half the consumers rat meat instead of beef and they wouldn’t know the difference.
> The changes we see in style can be attributed to changes in politics and civilization. Who we are and what we think of ourselves.
There is something to this even if the way this is expressed is clumsy
I found the office in the picture quite pleasant to look at. Not comforting and homey but suitable as a work environment.
You see the same thing with cars. People choose to buy (or more commonly lease!) a car for a few years and before they've even decided to buy it they're planning to sell it. This is why there are so many sad grey cars on the road - pick a colour that's easy to sell! Don't get anything too wild, it might not sell! What if you can't sell it because it's red or blue?!!? Don't go too crazy with that very pale blue tinted grey, they might not be able to sell it for as much and you won't get much from the leasing company!
There's a guy in my town who has a Porsche 992, it's only a few years old. He bought it as his retirement present to himself when he packed in his job at the start of COVID. It has all the options, and it has custom paint.
It is what I can only describe as Budget-Conscious Prosthetic Limb beige.
That kind of pinky-beige colour for NHS hearing aid plastic.
It cost him 1500 quid to even get it mixed, thousands extra to have it sprayed that colour.
"But what if it doesn't sell?" people say to him, "What if people don't like the colour?"
He doesn't care, he's going to drive it for the rest of his life. It'll be someone else's problem to sell once he dies.
I don't normally care about color myself, but I hate thr color my car is enough that I'm wondering if I should spend the several couple thousand dollars to put a decent coat of paint on it.
Why? Just buy a car, and drive it.
Even farther on the spectrum is Lamborghini where 100% are all custom made. You can't buy one from a dealership [new] that hasn't been custom ordered.
Someone will buy that 911 if/when he decides to sell it and have no problems getting a good price.
The theory I subscribe to is a few fold:
1) People like to buy "generic" homes that are easier to renovate/personalize 2) But then they don't end up personalizing, because they're afraid to tank it's market value 3) Thus homes stay boring and generic
Around me every house now has tall anthracite fully closed fences. It's gloomy as hell, streets went from cute garden with wood fences to lock-down mode in a few years. It's all the same model, all the same vibe..
Modern decor is what happens when you just go on Pinterest and outsource taste for a place you don't own and don't expect to live in for long.
I help immigrants move to Germany, and I often say that they only get to feel home once they can put their own frames on their walls. This means that they can finallt invest in the space they occupy, and fully inhabit it.
https://tubitv.com/series/300006728/columbo
Victimhood par excellence: "My brain is a 200+ IQ machine desperately waiting for input. However, I cannot feed it! It is the walls, I guess."
It should be legally enforced to place every author's smartphone usage statistics into such articles. No interior design on earth can compensate for 40 hours TikTok usage per week.
And we didn't mention other streaming services as well.
It might be the smartphone usage as well as time spend.
> This paper is a review, meaning it synthesizes and interprets existing research rather than presenting new experimental data. The authors themselves note that current visual tests for susceptibility to discomfort are subjective and poorly standardized. They also acknowledge that the proposed mechanism (that discomfort is the brain’s response to overwork) has not been fully tested, particularly the hypothesis that colored tints reduce discomfort by steering visual stimulation away from overactive brain areas. The relationship between the brain’s excitatory and inhibitory chemical signals and visual discomfort also remains, in their words, “unsettled.” Several key research questions are flagged as unresolved, including how to best quantify the real-world impact of visual stress on people’s lives and how to objectively measure susceptibility.
Flickering lights are about the only thing I saw in here that seem like they'd be a problem in the long term. Everything else your brain just adjusts to over time and stops noticing. Maybe the first few days in an office with bright colors would be slightly distracting, but after that you just stop seeing them. I would guess that a lot of the studies they reviewed probably tested people's reactions to these things when they saw them one time, not the hundredth time.
Wut? It's precisely the opposite. Natural patterns have infinite complexity as you zoom in, and human-made patterns (most often) not.
That's precisely what they're wrong about.
Take a look at tree branches. A field of grass. A stone cliff.
Now take a look at human-made decor: drywall, plastic, laminated boards.
Which one has more visual detail?
I dunno if I agree with their arguments in the paper (there seem to be some pretty big questions unanswered yet, which the authors acknowledge), but there's definitely something to the idea that natural environments aren't as stressful for us, even if they're objectively "busier".
Visual complexity is just wrong. God, what a useless website. The actual paper is here: https://www.mdpi.com/2411-5150/10/2/34
The default visual circuits in our brains may have evolved to optimally handle fractal patterns and textures. Straight lines, geometrical figures and featureless surfaces may require activation of less optimal circuits. Anecdotally, I find being in environments made of featureless geometrical figures uncomfortable to be in.
This made a big contribution because vertical short-form video feeds require extreme stimuli to get anyone’s attention - but they add nothing to the actual experience and often detract from it.
This has also led to tue absolutely horrific acoustics where even in non-nightclub bars and normal restaurants, you have to yell to understand each other because the decor is made of tile, tables and chairs are at odd angles that increase distance, etc.
Everything now is subordinate to the visual environment because that’s what gets shared on Instagram.
Not saying interior design doesn’t matter, but its point should be to create a great overall experience, not to be visually stimulating at the expense of the rest.
Forbidden
You don't have permission to access this resource. From Singapore.
I dont know if the hypothesis in the paper is correct, but it seems clear that environment can affect mood in some cases. There is a reason why night clubs and libraries are decorated differently. From there it seems very plausible other elements of environments could have an affect (perhaps subtle) on mood.
When I have to go I try to be out there as quickly as possible. I always thought that's weird, shouldn't those shops be designed in a way that makes me want to explore them, look at all the things they have, instead of just hunting down exactly what I need and leave as quickly as possible.
I have the same reaction to it as you.
Sometimes I really want/need something, and I have all the stores close by. But I still decide to buy it online, and accept waiting a few days, because stores/malls are such a bad experience.
Because immediately upon walking in the door, you are immersed in a "shopping environment". Everything you smell, hear, see, touch is geared to making you spend more and purchase more and grab more useless stuff off the shelves.
Even in a Goodwill or similar thrift store you are subjected to these merchandising tricks.
I have found that keeping a very good household inventory on a spreadsheet is critical. If I have this spreadsheet on my phone and I refer to it, before venturing into aisles, then I know exactly what I need to purchase, and where to go to find it. Sticking to the shopping list, I can avoid the needless purchase temptations.
At Costco when I'd go with my parents, it was the custom of the cashiers to ask, "did you find everything alright?" and my father would always joke, that if enough people answered in the affirmative, that was their cue to rearrange the store and shuffle everything around, so that shoppers would get lost, and not being able to find what they want, would discover more useless stuff that they would pull off the shelves on impulse.
It also doesn't hurt to follow the advice of "never shop while hungry"!
But I dislike malls so much, that I only get new clothes for example once it's really necessary. If it was more pleasant to shop there, I would probably buy more stuff.
I guess there are some people who fit into that environment, their tactics work well on them, and the shops/malls just ignore customers like me.
I could shop at a Wal-Mart or a Target for groceries, and thus be subject to all the same big-box shopping pitfalls.
I could shop at a farmers market style grocery store, and the major one near me has some great products and great foods, but mixed in with 90% ultra-processed foods, sugar bombs, and all sorts of unhealthy stuff, masquerading as organic or natural food. Also this "farmers market" has an extensive section with wine and beer, and personal health/hygiene products that are quite expensive.
At Trader Joe's I usually have no problem shopping for exactly what I need, and again, sticking to my spreadsheet with inventory and shopping needs. I usually pick up some fresh flowers here, because they're a bargain, and the coolest thing about Trader Joe's is that I can trust basically any product they've put on their shelves, and the limited selection, and restriction to food products only, helps narrow my shopping focus.
It is even possible to shop for groceries at the dollar stores nearby, which stock a lot of frozen foods, snack foods, beverages, etc. These bargain prices are generally justified by a lower bar of quality, or rapid expiration dates.
Another "grocery shopping" option is pharmacies or convenience stores. There is a major chain pharmacy nearby that really has a lot of good groceries, and is starting to stock some organic and natural brands as well. Its aisles are impeccable and the shopping experience is first-rate. Of course, as soon as I step in the door, the scent and sounds and feels assault me and begin to work on my consumer brain. Got to adhere firmly to that spreadsheet in my pocket!
never been diagnosed with adhd but i have this thing where most of life is not stimulating enough to keep me interested. to be clear this is not a screen addiction, i dont feel specific pressure to pull up my phone and i can go a long time without it. scrolling is only a fallback when im not talking with someone (that includes writing like right now), working on something interesting, outside with friends, playing games, working out, you get the idea.
creative things like coding and drawing almost always work. movies and football only if i care about it emotionally. alcohol helps some too. but a lot of activities like reading a book are just not enough. i would describe it as a non specific addiction to something that might be dopamine but that still wouldnt fully explain things.
when i go to the mall or the shopping street or a bar theres so much going on that i finally feel comfortable. on the other hand i almost never feel overwhelmed. my family is not like that (they absolutely hate shopping) but i think some of my friends are, never asked them about it. i dont know if its a type of neurodivergence or a learned behavior or something even stranger.
sounds like a great lead for psychology research.
In the same vein, contemporary art, like a Veronica, smashes form apart, and instead of concrete imitation of nature, it moves toward abstraction, geometry, and minimalism. But does not that come with a problem? It does not enter the brain directly the way natural forms do; you have to additionally recognize what it actually is. I do not think that is an incorrect observation.
Either way, light is everything, but it is treated like an afterthought.
I suspect besides objectively annoying flickering lights, the difference is primarily made in the immediate, subconscious and effortless recognition of ubiquitous patterns of function. Which happens in form and proportion first, and only to a lesser degree in color and contrast.
* this is the floor, this is the ceiling * through there, there is the entrance / exit * this is a reception desk
If it takes effort to filter out the noise, the glare to know such simple things, there is less capacity left in our brains to process other "essentially free" tasks.
To see those, you need a digital camera (e.g. your phone)
He showed people photos of geometric patterns (plain lines, basic shapes), natural patterns (fractals), and photos of nature itself (trees, animals, etc.) while reading their mental activity. The conclusion was that both fractals and nature photos cause significantly more efficient, diverse, and healthy-looking brain activity. Our brains inherently expect the world to look fractal-like, and in some ways even need it to look that way to form creative thoughts.
Completely lost the link to that article; it was a good read.
Those things are also just ugly.
Geometrical design (especially the ones with grids/vectors everywhere) are not minimalistic but tiring, really tiring.
> Modern decor is an interior design style that emerged in the early-to-mid 20th century, rooted in the Bauhaus movement. It is defined by "form following function," clean lines, open-concept floor plans, uncluttered spaces, and a warm, neutral color palette.
> Key traits of modern decor include:
> Clean Lines: A heavy emphasis on sleek, horizontal, and vertical lines without fussy ornamentation, curves, or intricate trim.
> Natural Materials: Frequent use of exposed wood, leather, steel, glass, and concrete to highlight natural beauty.
> Minimalist Furniture: Low-profile, simple furniture shapes. The philosophy revolves around "less is more," relying on intentional, high-impact pieces rather than crowding a space.
> Neutral Colors: Earthy tones, whites, beiges, grays, and monochromatic schemes dominate to create a calm, balanced environment.
> Abundant Light: Maximizing natural light through large windows and open spaces rather than relying heavily on dense window treatments.
Our management had the bright idea to put these things in all our meeting rooms on the wall with the TVs we use for remote calls. People started getting sea sick looking at them. Of course removing them would mean the management made a mistake, so they will stay there until the next bright idea hits.
I'm definitely going to do something else instead.