I think this article really misses the root cause. Take cellphones, for example. In the early 2000s there was a "Cambrian explosion" of cellphone designs as makers tried to figure out what would work best. It's easy to wax nostalgic for all the various flip phones/slide-out phones/"twist" phones, etc., but the fact is the "glass slab" really ended up working best - it has a lot fewer components to wear, and the lack of physical controls means that apps have lots of freedom to make full use of the screen. The glass slab design won out over all the others.
If anything, so much design (and not just industrial) seems boring today because everything seems to converge to the "optimal" design much faster. Cars had all these wacky designs in the 50s and 60s because we hadn't yet optimized for things like aerodynamics. When I first saw the "modern farmhouse" housing design in my city, I thought "that looks nice" - now it makes me gag because I see them everywhere, with insane prices to boot.
The Internet has caused, in many ways, a reduction of individual markets and "winner take all" economics, and that includes design. Much has already been written about how many logos all look the same now, e.g. https://www.sublimio.com/why-are-all-fashion-logos-becoming-...
With cell phones it is also about moving the physical device out of your consciousness so you can better utilize the actual application. And because each app does a different and unknown thing, you can’t design your hardware around your software.
However, with cars I think that doesn’t hold. Cars don't need to disappears into the background. Yet every car is converging on an unholy child of a minivan and a small crossover SUV. They are all the same and they are all equally ugly. Sacrificing a bit of aerodynamics for any level of personality would be a welcome shakeup.
> Yet every car is converging on an unholy child of a minivan and a small crossover SUV
Because it's a local maximum of utility. Most people don't care that their car "lacks personality" or "looks ugly to auto enthusiasts" - they just want it to be safe, efficient, and capable. Crossover-type vehicles generally get you the best combination of the three.
To add to this: I see anonymity becoming more desired by the general population as surveillance and threat of law enforcement, car thieves, and road rage amplifies.
Blending in feels much safer these days. Much like herd animal behavior.
I had a friend who had his local company logos all over the car.
After 2 or 3 years he had enough of „hey I saw you passing by can you do small thing for us while you’re around”.
I think he also went with as generic looking car as possible after that.
When I was 20yo I thought cars are cool and having car that would stand out would be great.
Closing in on 40 I couldn’t care less. If it is safe, doesn’t break down, gets me to places I am happy.
I have my own ways to express myself as a person, car is definitely not the thing.
Same. I just bought pretty much the cheapest used EV I could find that looked alright to me and had enough range. Happy as a clam.
I'm not interested in wasting tens of thousands of dollars on slightly more comfortable seats and stuff like that. I could, it just doesn't seem worth it. I'd rather have the money for other things.
Maybe next time I'll buy a slightly more premium car like a Volvo EC30 or something like that, if I can find a nice used one for a decent price. I don't see any reason to buy new cars. In my market a 4 year old car (still under warranty) is literally less than half the price of a new one. I don't think the warranty is worth that much.
Strong disagree on crossovers providing the "best combination of the three." People seem to think this, assuming that their purchases are influenced by thought... But based on my observations (and physics); Sedans, coupes, or anything with less mass will be safer, more efficient, and more capable. It's actually the tendency of people to purchase crossovers and even more massive vehicles that results in smaller vehicles being seen as "less safe". It has created an arms race of sorts, but doesn't change that F=ma. Car companies want to sell you a crossover because it's good for them, not us. Just stop and think for a minute why there are no SUV motorsport series... Enthusiasts have competitions for almost every type of vehicle except the type that most people buy. SUVs / crossovers are like dull, heavy knives wielded by the inexperienced and uncaring.
> Sedans, coupes, or anything with less mass will be ... more capable
I beg to differ. They may be safer and more efficient, but they get those advantages by trading off cargo and passenger space. A crossover can carry a heck of a lot more than a sedan and still fit 5 people - hence why it's the "local maximum."
SUVs and crossovers actually tend to have less useable interior area than vans or station wagons. Another advantage of vans and station wagons is that they're built on chassis similar to sedans which allow you to maintain a low center of gravity for better handling.
Most people don't really care about cars. It's a tool that gets you places and carries your stuff. Ideally for the lowest cost. People care a lot more about safety ratings, fuel efficiency, and resale value than they to about unconventional design.
This seems intuitively obvious, new car buyers overwhelmingly put design way down the list of priorities.
I think it was the same in the 50s and 60s, just that the then car manufacturers hadn’t figured out how to compete in the other more important aspects as effectively.
I don't believe that. The pre-CAFE cars had soul. The new ones are all boring jellybeans.
Proof: look at a 1970 'Cuda. Tell me you wouldn't buy it in an instant if you had the cash!
https://www.classicautomall.com/vehicles/264/1970-plymouth-a...
Have fun with your jellybean! (Sorry)
I do have the cash, but I'm happy with my Opel Corsa-E that I bought used for mostly money I had sitting in my checking account.
It has heated seats, heated steering wheel, AC, backing camera/sensors, uses electricity which means it costs practically nothing to drive, doesn't make noise, isn't hard to get going in an uphill, and probably about 100 other advantages.
True, but it's boring :-)
Funny, I don’t know if you’re being sarcastic or sincere because I can’t tell the difference between that car and a Mustang or a Charger from the same decade.
I am sad for you.
In any case, the '67 and '68 Mustangs are the best looking of the Mustang line, and the '68 Dodge Charger is to die for.
If you cannot tell the difference, may I suggest you spend a wonderful evening watching "Bullitt".
When I was in high school, a friend of mine bought a '67 Mustang for $200, so of course he offered me a ride. I had never ridden in one before. I barely had the door closed when he stomped on the gas. What can I say, it was a transformative experience! I soon acquired one for myself. Converted it to a 4-speed, hopped up the engine, and had a grand time with it for years until a garbage truck turned it into an accordion.
I still miss that car.
But I did wind up replacing it with a 72 Dodge Challenger, which is close to being a Cuda. I spent a lot of money on its engine in the machine shop. I enjoy every second driving it, and giving friends rides in it.
Like me before I got the ride in the Mustang, you gotta get a ride in one before you dis it.
My friend had a 72 Dodge Challenger, in beautiful primer gray, that he paid $500 for. Nice car for a senior in college at the time.
I'd still rather have my 20-year-old 350Z.
If you want the Z, go get it!
That’s hilariously ugly.
The prices they fetch today suggest otherwise.
Nostalgia accounts for that.
I'm mixed on touch screen vs physical controls happening. A Tesla has physical controls for shifting, turning, cruise control, current media and I guess you can include accelerate and brake. That said, I want all cars to be the same. I want them to have Android Audio, Apple CarPlay. I do not want custom apps in each car. I just want to connect my phone in and have it do all the things unrelated to operating the car itself.
So at least in some ways, I want them more the same, not less. I live in an area where Waymo is common so I see self driving cars all the time. In other words, unlike people not in an area like this, I have actual experience with them working and working well. As soon as they are available for purchase I will buy one. Ideally one with no controls. No steering wheel, no accelerator, no brake peddle, no turn signal. At which point, I suspect, like phones, they may get even more alike. All that stuff is un-needed in a level 5 self-driving car
I'm sure someone is going to respond such stuff will be needed for emergencies or whatever. I think that middle stage will only last 5-10 years and then they'll take out the manual controls. They took out manual controls from elevators 70 years ago. They're taking out almost all controls now. IIRC Toyota already has such vehicles. I know Honda showed of designs years ago. They're a platform that carries a box. The box can be a cargo box, a food truck box, a 12 person passenger box, more comfy 6 person box. No driver's seat.
Elevators still have manual controls, if you open a secret panel with a key, and turn another key to change the operating mode. See Deviant Ollam's talks.
You change gears on Teslas by swiping on the screens.
God, I have no idea if you're kidding or not.
Having driven the Model 3 my dad got as his retired old man car, this is not true. There's a "Drive/Neutral/Reverse" lever on the steering column. It doesn't have a transmission. That's the great part about electric motors. The power is always right there. It's never in the wrong gear.
One part of what's driving cars to all look the same is mandated fuel-efficiency targets, which make aerodynamics a primary design factor that overrides nearly all others. Sacrificing any amount of aerodynamics is unlikely to happen under that regulatory environment.
This just isn't true.
It's very possible to make highly aerodynamic sedan, hatch and SUVs. Drag coefficients are available for most cars.
A bigger difference is detailing: things like mirrors make a huge difference.
In that case, estate cars would like a word with the current crop of SUVs
I think that's why cars like the PT Cruiser had decent sales and positive views, despite being an absolute piece of trash mechanically. I mean I thought it was ugly as hell, but it didn't look exactly like every other car which was nice.
So Cybertruck.
You just get burned alive when the computerised door handles stop working and the reinforced windows can't be broken.
The product demo showed how to handle the reinforced windows.
More like the Mazda cx5, Toyota rav4, and Honda crv. Those things are everywhere and then some.
People like them, and buy them. Not sure why the mystery.
I was talking about car, not Home Depot refrigerator specials from 2010.
I think also a century of margin squeeze has trimmed off basically all the fat. Get rid of finials, cornices, non-standard windows, and then look for the next victim. It's like in the 60s everyone decided that more modern means more simple and we've only stripped back from then on.
Everything from machine tools to appliances and housing has much less decoration now that it used to. Industrial stuff is all very clean and tidy in painted cubes and blocks of flats and houses are very shipshape and AirBnB fashion, but there's no heart in a lot of it.
Part of it is manufacturing techniques - when you had hand made features and hand-sculpted cast components, there's an innate organic nature. With modern CAD/CAM and materials handling, sheet, slab and bar is often the order of the day, and even plastic mouldings tend towards utilitarian. High end stuff can still get a nice-looking casting, but it's a premium value-add, whereas previously the whole unit was premium. Oddly, it's never been cheaper in labour to get a plaster decoration made, but you can hardly get them, whereas they were sold in catalogues by the ton when they were carefully hand-moulded.
And yes, things are far cheaper in many ways (housing excepted), so it's not all bad news, but it's just very sterile.
Which is a shame because I'm fairly sure that nearly everyone except for some die-hard Brutalists and float glass manufacturers actually love pretty buildings and even originally mildly interesting buildings become tourist attractions among the glass slabs and cubes today.
> It's like in the 60s everyone decided that more modern means more simple and we've only stripped back from then on.
That actually started way sooner than in the 60s. For a good starting point see the 1910 essay Ornament and Crime from Adolf Loos, but even that was a bit after the cultural change already started, though before it was widely applied.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornament_and_Crime
"Get rid of finials, cornices, non-standard windows, and then look for the next victim."
Well, I live in a house built in the Victorian era and I love my cornices and architraves decorated with classical shapes that go back to antiquity—astragals, cavettos and such—and my cedar doors, panelling, window sills, skirting boards again all shaped with classical mouldings—ogees, coves, ovolos, cymae, scotias, beadings, etc mostly together in various architecturally-pleasing combinations. And, yes, my house even has a finial on top.
These days, it's unfortunate that many of us never give much consideration to or take time to even look at these decorative shapes let alone examine them carefully. Shame really, as they aren't just fleeting fashion from the bygone Victorian era but are wonderful geometric shapes and curves that have stood the test of time, in fact they've been appreciated for at least several thousand years.
"Oddly, it's never been cheaper in labour to get a plaster decoration made, but you can hardly get them, whereas they were sold in catalogues by the ton when they were carefully hand-moulded."
I don't consider my house to be exceptional by any stretch but still it's an ongoing testament to both good design and to the excellent skills of craftsmen who built it. That build quality is just not available today despite builders and carpenters having excellent timesaving tools not available in yesteryears.
Moreover, those classical geometric curves cut into the woodwork in my house weren't done with modern machinery (say a spindle moulder) but planed by hand with either a wooden hand plane or a combination plane like the Stanley No. 45†, and cutting mouldings this way is difficult and requires considerable skill (I know, I've had to do it when making repairs).
Unfortunately, as you've mentioned, modern CAD/CAM and other industrial tech has made manufacturing easier than ever and yet design (and often quality) have almost hit rock bottom. Whether it's building houses or computers and or any numbers of things, design is almost nonexistent; or little or no thought has been given to the ergonomics of how products are used (I'm continually whingeing on HN about the terrible ergonomics of much software produced these days).
These aren't isolated cases, recently on separate occasions I've purchased cargo-type work pants (different brands) and the special smartphone pockets in both aren't deep enough to do the zipper up, my normal sized phone protrudes about a cm above the zipper (it's a great feature to prevent phone loss but totally useless if it can't be zipped). How the fuck can something as obvious as that happen?
I've come to the conclusion it's a combination of manufacturers maximizing profit and the fact that too few complain, a general drop in aesthetic appreciation across society and our disposable throwaway culture: "who cares if it doesn't look good or it's buggy, we'll be chucking it out in a year or so anyway."
_
† I own a Stanley No. 45, if look carefully in these links you'll see numbers of its plane irons have curved cutting surfaces that conform to the geometry of those curves. https://www.carters.com.au/index.cfm/index/9072-woodworking-...
https://www.jimbodetools.com/products/complete-set-of-22-cut...
I also wonder if there's a element of tools and training.
Modern CAD tools have been horrible at "fiddly" ornamentation for decades compared to a hand drawn decoration. There was once an article about this but I can't find it now.
And then when architects spend careers building cubes and angular slab-sided and regular shapes they don't train their apprentices and juniors to be able to conceive, specify and draw a pleasing ogee and a proportional scrollwork around a window.
And there's definitely an element of can't-be-arsed about things. Riffing on your clothing example, I have an, IMO, outrageously expensive designer hoodie I was once given. It quickly failed because the kangaroo pouch was just sewn onto the single-layer front with no backing to reinforce the corner. Instant hole. Though there's some element of survivor bias there, as all the real shit from the 1920s fell apart immediately too, so it's not that everything was great.
I think you are confusing optimal design for the design that makes them the most money by appealing to the maximum amount of people. It’s why all of our cars are now black, white, or silver/gray. Don’t you dare waste a bit of money on red paint someone might not want! So everything around us turns into gray goo that takes no chances at all so it can make the most money. Then it becomes a worse and worse feedback loop.
I think it’s a mix of social media and risk aversion, this article touches on the broader discussion as it impacts many kinds of design
https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average
Brilliant, I have always felt that one of the major problems with machine learning, consequently LLMs, is the boring average based loss functions that under-represent the unique and the rare. It seems our collective civilization is using a similar function and heading in the same direction of optimizing for the average.
The world is rapidly homogenising. You see it with “air space” interior design - coffee shops have the same aesthetic in every major city in the world. You see it in local fashions. You see it as a tourist - travel anywhere in the world and the chances are you’ll find the same kind of shop selling the same kind of trinket. Made in China with a subtly different graphic on it to represent the country you’re in.
This has been happening ever since trade routes were established across Eurasia (Silk Road) or the Americas were discovered. It only keeps accelerating as movement and trade becomes easier.
If pockets of humanity could isolate themselves from the rest, we could get diversity growing again, that one sentinel island might be our only hope.
The general term for what you're describing here is a Dominant Design, and it has a lot of the characteristics of what you intuited. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_design
> The glass slab design won out over all the others.
It is a shame that this is true, because I have never loved any slab-of-glass phone the way I loved my old BlackBerries. I just can't type properly without physical feedback; I'm constantly making and correcting typos, all slow and awkward. The phone no longer feels like a tool ought to feel: an extension of myself into the world - it's just some gadget I'm obligated to carry around and put up with.
I had an interesting experience with this - I have a friend who talks about their phone and its keyboard exactly how you do, so I asked to watch them type something out on the keyboard.
He painstakingly erases every mistyped letter along the way and demand precision that is impossible given the constraints.
When I type on a phone keyboard, it is a tool for communicating, not for typing, and I type word-wise instead of letter-wise and use the autocorrect/correction bar liberally. I'll do maybe one or two more manual edits when I am fully done typing. I tried to get him to try this approach and he just couldn't do it. He needed every letter to be the one he meant to hit.
When I need to type something I know autocorrect will screw up, or I am typing a URL or something it won't get right, I slow down dramatically and type like they do. Not quite swiping, but holding my finger longer to see the pop-up.
Not sure if it is a worldview thing, a way the brain works thing, or something else, but it has been a long ongoing conversation between me and him about the different ways we use computer and computer adjacent devices - I'm more than happy with search-centric interfaces, he hates them and needs manual organization, etc. This carries over to AI where I perceive it as a partner in completing a task, he sees it as an unreliable and unruly tool that won't follow his precise instructions.
My experience sounds much the same, yes. I suppose your friend also touch-types? I find it very difficult to look at my fingers instead of the text while I'm trying to write - it's so distracting! - but of course that makes it tougher to hit the simulated keys I mean to press. I suspect that people who never learned to type properly might have an easier time of it.
This likely compounds: when some task will be an order of magnitude easier if I wait to do it on a computer, I'm unlikely to bother attempting it on a phone, so I likely never spend enough time trying to write on a phone to develop fluency with its interface.
I never use autocorrect or any sort of typing-assistance features, on the phone or anywhere else. All the flashing and zooming is unbearably distracting, and the machine guesses wrong often enough that it feels like more hindrance than help.
I have not yet spent enough time playing with AI tools to have developed much of an opinion about them, but I can easily imagine why your friend might feel that way - I, too, have very little patience for unruly tools! If I have to think about the tool, and manage it, and can't just wield it as an extension of my mind, it usually feels better to just do the work by hand, even if that would take longer.
> My experience sounds much the same, yes. I suppose your friend also touch-types? I find it very difficult to look at my fingers instead of the text while I'm trying to write - it's so distracting! - but of course that makes it tougher to hit the simulated keys I mean to press. I suspect that people who never learned to type properly might have an easier time of it.
We are both touch typists, I actually don't know how I would type on a phone keyboard quickly while looking at the letters. I don't, I look at the words to see if they correct the way I want them to.
> I never use autocorrect or any sort of typing-assistance features, on the phone or anywhere else.
Yeah, that pretty much makes touchscreen keyboards useless. It is a fundamental part of their design IMO. Like trying to use a stand mixer to make bread but cranking it manually instead of using the motor because you can't feel the dough.
> Yeah, that pretty much makes touchscreen keyboards useless. It is a fundamental part of their design IMO.
If it’s a fundamental part of their design, then why does it suck so hard?
80/20 problem. You are in the 20 and they don't care.
Interesting that you also touch-type, but it doesn't bother you that you can't know whether you're hitting the keys you're aiming for. I wonder what that would feel like.
Autocorrect/complete features may well be a fundamental part of the intended usage, but they make the experience substantially worse for me. It takes less work and causes less frustration to simply fix my typos than it would to battle with an obstreperous moron robot which thinks it knows what I am trying to say better than I do.
Unfortunately autocorrect on iPhones at least has been garbage recently. It used to fix words as they were typed, and underlined in red if it couldn't guess, to completely rewriting more than one word going back and giving no visual indication that it happened. This is especially problematic when texting quickly/casually without perfect grammar and it ends up butchering lots of words.
Oh and it's even worse than that if the keyboard is set to support more than one language, where autocorrect will just do whatever it wants.
In the end I just turned autocorrect off on my phone.
The correction bar is a bit better, but it likes to reorder words and often lags even on my new iPhone 17PM.
Also coffee shops and air bnbs:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2024/jan/16/the-tyranny-of-...
Cars all look the same now because, due to fuel economy regulations, they are all designed in a wind tunnel to minimize drag. Also, regulations cover all kinds of things, mainly to reduce injury to pedestrians.
You cannot even tell if a car is a Ferrari these days, unless you can see the badge.
> reduce injury to pedestrians
Strange then that everyone around me is driving some kind of high fronted armoured car
I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with reducing injury to pedestrians and everything to do with reducing injury to occupants.
I think trucks are exempt from a lot of those rules.
> You cannot even tell if a car is a Ferrari these days, unless you can see the badge.
This seems like excessive hyperbole, I can reliably tell apart every marque on the road in my country by lights and grille shape.
So you can't tell from the side?
The current Ferrari lineup helpfully has a badge on the side. But even without that, something like the SF90 is pretty recognizable from the side:
https://www.gtrent.com/upload/images/modelli/ferrari/sf90_sp...
Kinda looks like a Corvette :-(
Then there's this one:
https://www.caranddriver.com/ferrari/roma
I suspect that's because Corvette has copied a lot of the Ferrari and Lamborghini design language in recent decades.
The Ferrari 308 was released in 1975, and it's recognizably similar to the SF90, aside from its side air scoop. Compare to the Corvette Stingray from the same year, which has that classic "we don't really do design but it's got a V8" Detroit look.
I'm not saying emissions standards haven't had an effect, but there have been other forces changing the styling of cars as well. If anything, some body shapes like Corvette's for example have become more interesting in recent years - the blocky rear end from the 80s and 90s was replaced by something that actually has curves.