Why does everything need to look like an iPhone?
Seriously.
Phones, appliances, cars, furniture, houses.
Black. White. Grey. Silver aluminium. Soft radius. Tiny logo. Maybe one LED somewhere.
Done.
Apparently we have achieved good design.
And I am tired of it.
I don’t hate minimalism because I want every toaster covered in gold carvings and peacocks. The problem is that minimalism was never supposed to mean remove every trace of life from the object.
Dieter Rams’ whole thing was basically less, but better.
Put what the user actually needs.
Don’t add things for no reason.
That is very different from:
anodised aluminium = premium.
Somewhere along the way we turned a design philosophy into an aesthetic preset.
And now everything looks like it came from the same factory in the same imaginary country.
What is the thing actually supposed to be?
This started because I was watching John Mauriello from Design Theory talk about Ferrari’s new electric car.
And I think the problem with it is actually pretty simple.
It feels like someone was asked to design a product with features instead of a sports car.
What screens does it have?
What new tech does it have?
What can we put in the presentation?
What can we say is different?
But before any of that, surely the first question should be:
what is a Ferrari supposed to feel like?
It is a sports car.
It is supposed to be impractical.
It is supposed to go fast.
It is supposed to make you turn around after parking it.
Nobody is buying a Ferrari because they did a cost-benefit analysis and discovered it was the most sensible transport option.
If I wanted pure function I would buy something else.
A Ferrari is almost entirely about experience.
So if you start designing it like a tech product, of course something gets lost.
The features should come after the identity.
Not the other way around.
And I think this applies to basically everything.
A syringe is not supposed to communicate the same thing as a Ferrari.
A syringe should probably communicate:
clean
precise
effective
trustworthy
A power tool should feel capable.
A kettle can feel warm and familiar.
A Ferrari should probably feel like a Ferrari.
Every product creates some emotion.
The emotion just has to make sense for what the thing actually is.
The toaster can have some personality
This is where I probably disagree with a lot of modern “premium” design.
Why does a toaster need to disappear?
It sits in your kitchen every day.
Someone designed the shape.
Someone picked the material.
Someone chose the colour.
Why does the correct answer always seem to be:
silver box.
Maybe black if we are feeling adventurous.
Put some art into the thing.
And I don’t mean decoration for decoration’s sake.
That is just the opposite problem.
Character should come from somewhere.
The material.
The culture.
The place.
How it is made.
What it is used for.
The original inspiration.
Something.
I tried this in my own wet grinder project.
Part of the inspiration came from the davara used for South Indian filter coffee.
I explored black because obviously black works, but I also tried brass because I was looking at the vessels and materials around that culture.
Whether I executed it perfectly is a completely different question.
But at least I was asking:
where does this object come from?
Not:
what does a premium appliance look like right now?
I think objects should be allowed to have a memory.
Cultural design is not putting a lotus on it
The easiest way to mess this up is to decide every Indian product now needs:
lotus
mandala
temple arch
brass
random traditional pattern
Congratulations.
You have created Indian Edition™.
That is not what I mean.
One of my favourite examples of doing culture properly is actually Sleeping Dogs.
The developers were not from Hong Kong.
But they went there.
They studied it.
They took the place seriously.
The game does not constantly stand behind you going:
LOOK GUYS. CHINA. KUNG FU. JACKIE CHAN.
It just commits to being a Hong Kong crime noir story.
Hong Kong is not a feature.
It is the world.
And I think an outsider can absolutely design for another culture.
You just need to go in wanting to learn instead of wanting to judge.
Sometimes you have to look at something and accept:
this is how it works here.
If somebody made Sleeping Dogs: India and saw a two-lane road completely packed with bikes, autos, buses, people, parked vehicles and whatever else has decided to join the ecosystem that day, they shouldn’t replace it with some perfect four-lane boulevard because:
“well obviously this would be better urban planning.”
Maybe.
But now you are not representing the place.
You are correcting it.
Learn first.
Judge later.
Sometimes friction is good
Another thing we seem obsessed with is making everything frictionless.
Less effort.
Less waiting.
Less thinking.
One tap.
Infinite scroll.
Auto everything.
But friction is not automatically bad.
I made my own phone deliberately more annoying to use.
My home screen is basically a search bar and the names of apps written as text.
That’s it.
I use app limits.
I make things grayscale.
I have basically spent money on a smartphone and then slowly converted it into a brick.
And it works.
I check social media much less now.
So technically my phone became less convenient.
But for what I actually wanted, it became better.
That raises a better question than:
how do we remove friction?
Ask:
who is the friction helping?
Instagram wants opening Instagram to be frictionless.
Obviously.
I might want opening Instagram to be mildly annoying because I have things to do.
Funny how friction is apparently terrible until you try cancelling a subscription.
Then suddenly we discover twelve screens.
I bought it. Let me mess with it.
I think consumer products should generally give people control.
Repair it.
Modify it.
Paint it.
Swap parts.
Install different software.
Put stickers all over it.
Make it objectively uglier if that is what you want.
You bought it.
It is yours.
That is what owning something means.
Obviously there are limits.
If I’m designing a medical device or some engineering control system, I am not going to let somebody change an emergency red light to green because it matches their aesthetic better.
There are places where the designer has to put their foot down.
Safety.
Clarity.
Shared conventions.
Fine.
But outside of that?
Why not?
Sometimes customization is useful.
Sometimes it is literally just fun.
“Because it is fun” should be allowed to be a design reason once in a while.
Not everything needs a KPI.
And customization should also not become an excuse for the designer doing nothing.
You cannot give me a blank grey slab and say:
“the user will personalize it.”
No.
You still have to design the thing.
Make a complete object first.
Then let people make it theirs.
Things should be allowed to get old
I also think we design far too much around the factory-new version of a product.
The render.
The launch image.
The perfect prototype.
The thing nobody has touched yet.
Real life is not a KeyShot scene.
Someone is going to scratch it.
Drop it.
Repair it.
Get oil on it.
Leave it in sunlight.
Put stickers on it.
Use the wrong cleaning product.
Own it for ten years.
That should be part of the equation.
I want my stuff to last as long as possible.
I think that is partly why people trust something like Steam so much too.
There is a feeling of:
this thing I bought years ago is probably still going to be here.
Longevity creates trust.
And physical products can get more beautiful through use too.
A worn camera.
A guitar covered in stickers.
A modified motorcycle.
A laptop that clearly went everywhere with someone.
Sometimes the object looks better because a human actually lived with it.
There is factory beauty.
Then there is lived beauty.
A good product should survive both.
We optimized everything to death
I do think algorithms make design more homogeneous.
But to be fair, we were already perfectly capable of doing this ourselves.
Once something works, everyone copies it.
Because now it is proven.
There is data.
There is precedent.
Someone can put it in a PowerPoint and defend it in a meeting.
And then we optimize it until nothing interesting is left.
That is why you get fashion from completely different places slowly becoming the same thing too.
Same makeup.
Same clothes.
Same look.
Then somebody imports the whole style into Chennai and puts on a leather jacket.
Brother.
It is 45 degrees outside.
You are going to meet God.
Context exists.
Take the road nobody has taken yet sometimes.
But that also does not mean:
be weird for the sake of being weird.
That is just another algorithm.
The difference still needs an origin.
An idea.
A reason.
Something.
AI, the potential man of technology
AI did not invent slop.
We were making slop before AI.
Then we trained AI on the internet.
Which contains a lot of slop.
And now it can produce slop at incredible speed.
Progress.
At this point I think AI is the potential man of technology.
Basically Megumi from Jujutsu Kaisen.
Apparently capable of everything.
Infinite potential.
Going to revolutionize every industry.
Any day now.
Meanwhile half the time it is making slop while the infrastructure behind it uses absurd amounts of energy and water.
Potential man behaviour.
I still think AI is basically a very advanced collage machine.
Yes, technically there is more happening underneath than physically cutting two pictures and gluing them together.
But the problem for me is that it does not have a reason for why those things should be together.
An artist can connect two things because they lived something.
They remember something.
They grew up somewhere.
They hate something.
They love something.
They saw something nobody else paid attention to.
AI has none of that.
It can make the combination.
It does not know why the combination matters.
That does not mean humans cannot create meaning around AI things afterward.
Look at Tung Tung Tung Sahur.
By itself?
AI slop.
Then people made memes, fan art, stories and jokes around it until it became an actual cultural thing.
People jokingly called it an angel born in hell, which is perfect.
The origin can be hollow.
Humans can still adopt it and create meaning around it.
We do that constantly.
Jugaad is another version of this.
Someone takes an object and gives it a use the original designer never imagined.
That does not mean the original thing failed.
People make meaning too.
Beauty does something
This is maybe the thing that annoys me most about sterile minimalism.
People act like beauty is somehow extra.
Optional.
Something you add after the “real” design is finished.
But humans have been decorating things forever.
Jewellery exists across cultures separated by enormous distances.
Makeup exists.
Decorated pottery exists.
Clothing exists beyond simply covering your body.
Architecture exists beyond putting four walls and a roof around you.
Clearly at some point humans collectively decided:
function is not enough.
We want this thing to mean something.
We want it to look beautiful.
We want it to say something about us.
Even Ada Lovelace described her approach as poetical science.
That idea makes sense to me.
Technical thinking and artistic thinking do not have to fight each other.
The toaster still has to make toast.
But once we have solved the incredible engineering problem of heating bread, maybe we can also make the toaster nice to look at.
What is life without art?
Seriously.
The grey house people
This is why those completely grey Instagram house renovations make me sad.
Grey walls.
Grey flooring.
Grey sofa.
White kitchen.
Black taps.
One plant somewhere fighting for its life.
Why?
A home should look like someone lives there.
Have colour.
Have texture.
Put art on the wall.
Put some weird thing you bought because you liked it.
Have objects that do not perfectly match.
Decorate.
And if you overdo it?
Fine.
Strip some of it down and try again.
That sounds much better to me than starting from:
nothing must have personality because personality might be tacky.
The funny part is that movies already understand this.
When they want AI, corporations, laboratories or dystopian futures to feel inhuman, what do they show?
White.
Grey.
Black.
Glass.
Cold lighting.
No clutter.
No texture.
Nothing personal.
Nothing alive.
We literally use sterility as visual shorthand for inhuman.
Then we turn around and decorate real houses like that and call it premium.
Interesting.
Designers need some actual power
John also talks about designers losing control of design.
And yeah.
A lot of decisions are already made before the designer even starts.
Marketing.
Management.
Finance.
Investors.
Engagement numbers.
Algorithms.
Then the designer gets called in to make it look good.
I think design needs more power inside companies.
Not total power.
The designer does not become emperor.
But if engineering, finance, marketing and operations all get a serious voice, design should not be invited at the end to choose the radius.
And designers should push back when something is clearly wrong.
Ideally.
But I am also not going to pretend everyone can dramatically flip the table and walk out.
People have rent.
You need companies where disagreement is allowed.
Or at least a boss with decent ethics.
Otherwise, my friend, you are in trouble.
And if designers do get more power, then they also get more responsibility.
Spider-Man has entered the boardroom again.
Design is already about the future
This is probably the part I agree with most.
Design is already a bet on a better future.
That is basically where the job starts.
You look at something and think:
this could be better for the person using it.
Sometimes that means moving a button.
Sometimes it means changing an entire system.
People also cannot always tell you what the future should be because they only know what already exists.
There is that famous “faster horses” idea.
People can ask for a better version of something they already understand.
Sometimes somebody has to show them another possibility.
That is where design can lead.
But there is a difference between:
here is a future you did not know was possible
and
we have decided this cold sterile future is good for you, please adjust accordingly.
I hope it is not cyberpunk
I really hope the future is not cyberpunk.
Although we seem extremely committed to testing the concept.
If I had to choose, I would want something closer to solarpunk.
Not literally the aesthetic.
If every city suddenly got the exact same solarpunk buildings, congratulations, we have done it again.
I mean the idea.
Clean energy.
Nature actually integrated into how we live.
Cities that still look different from each other.
Local shops where you can repair your stuff.
Products you actually own.
Technology that gives people more control.
And enough time left over to be a person.
Not everybody is going to love their job.
Some jobs just need doing.
But if you do not love what you do, I hope you still have enough time, money and energy afterward to pursue something you actually care about.
If technology doubles productivity and the result is:
great, now do twice the work
then what exactly did we improve?
The whole point was supposed to be making life better.
Maybe we stopped believing in the future
I think this is why everything feels so gloomy now.
People genuinely do not believe there is a way out.
Look at how we imagine the future.
Climate collapse.
AI replacing everyone.
Corporations owning everything.
Cyberpunk.
Black Mirror.
Cities becoming impossible to afford.
Everything somehow becoming a subscription.
We stopped imagining:
what could we build?
and started imagining:
how do we survive what is coming?
That changes design too.
Instead of asking what kind of future we actually want, we keep polishing the current system.
Same problems.
Same structures.
More screens.
Smoother aluminium.
Maybe part of design’s job is to remind people that there are other roads.
Because if nobody draws another future, obviously we end up following the one already in front of us.
No conclusion
I don’t think the answer is ornament everywhere.
I don’t think the answer is sterile minimalism either.
I don’t think every product needs to scream for attention.
I just think things should come from somewhere.
A place.
A culture.
A material.
A person.
A memory.
A reason.
Make the thing work.
Make it safe.
Remove what does not need to be there.
But after that?
Have some life.
Have colour.
Have texture.
Have art.
Let people customize things.
Let things age.
Let cities look like the places they actually are.
Let the toaster have a personality.
And please stop wearing leather jackets in Chennai.
Design was supposed to make life better.
Maybe we should start designing like we actually believe a better future is possible.
