I tried to give this video a good-faith watch, but found myself disagreeing with much of the evidence, conclusions, and research. It seems to be trying to diagnosing cleanslop — the minimalist and flat trend, which renders poorly as being clinical and lifeless. My point was that economics drive aesthetic, and in that framing, I think we both agree corporations will deliver the least amount of design tolerable.
Design-differentiated products still exist (Apple as mentioned, IKEA, Nike, Linear to name a few), but they're outnumbered in the current landscape and arguably still greedy.
>Design-differentiated products still exist (Apple as mentioned, IKEA, Nike, Linear to name a few), but they're outnumbered in the current landscape and arguably still greedy.
I believe that was ultimately what my response wanted to emphasize, and partially the call to action of the video. There is great design out there, but you need to wander through oceans of slop to find it. I had no clue about "Superblocks" until that video.
Likewise, to link the ideas back to Herr; AI is creating an ocean of slop that will make it nearly impossible to find the truly innovative used of AI out there. Curation was already a hard problem pre-AI and this only increases such difficulty by magnitudes. Among reducing said slop (which is nearly impossible now), the call to action is to have proper tastemakers lead the charge and bring out good ideas. Not just ones that generate the most money. Curation by definition almost always lowers view traffic to increase customer satisfaction, and that's not something our ad-based datascape wants.