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.

When everything in your house is illuminated from point lights stuck in holes in the ceiling, you only get a visual hierarchy along an axis you mostly cannot use (Y/up/down). When the lights are positioned at vertical midpoints, you get visual hierarchy on the X-Z (horizontal) plane which is generally how we are viewing our environment. The layering of shadow and highlights across a room are a lot less stressful to interpret. You can use a lot less total light and still convey required detail in the scene.

> 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.

There are no pretty pictures in it, just text discussing basic principles.

https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/0593139313

The Interior Design Handbook by Frida Ramstedt

For our new house, I used this book along with an experienced interior designer and discussions with a number of interior designers.

Far from being expensive, the designer probably saved us around 10 times her charges, by gently pointing out more practical and durable alternatives to my half baked ideas. And we ended up with a nice cozy, accessible, human friendly house.

For our garden, we used a garden designer ( not a landscape designer, they just stick hard surfaces everywhere ) who specialises in Piet Oudolf's New Perennial style.

Wut? It's precisely the opposite. Natural patterns have infinite complexity as you zoom in, and human-made patterns (most often) not.

More recently, it’s less about the buyers and more about the sellers. Design is optimized for flipping, which means fast market movement, which means generic. Yes there is always cookie-cutter, especially in postwar housing boom. Modern markets have just embraced that more fully. Offices don’t embody the tenants identity, or if they do it’s the same as all the other companies “in the space.” Everyone wants to look like Google, at best, otherwise it’s about commodity layouts, finishes, and styles… platforms for cubicles and bulk furniture purchases that can be amortized over the lease. Housing is similar… design for a family that will scatter once the kids leave home and the parents retire elsewhere. Or the inverse… design for Airbnb until the owners are ready to retire and move in or sell off. In any case the inhabitants are a secondary consideration to returns on investment. Design is a cost center to a financial concern.

Unless you’re rich enough not to care about any of this, in which case there’s finally time and space and money for design, but none of it really matters

I'll sum up by saying modern interiors feel temporary, where old decor seems permanent in comparison. This leads to you feeling like a hotel guest instead of being home. You have to really work at it to make a modern interior feel like home:

- Modern homes have lots of closet space and storage, so there's little need for "storage furniture like bookshelves, curios, hutches, sideboards and cabinets (you can get $5000+ china cabinets on marketplace for $200 here). When we moved in, I got rid of probably 14 pieces of (mostly beautiful) storage furniture because we just didn't need them. So it's hard to pile up the artifacts of life where they are easy to see and even grab.

- Living areas are large and open, and fantastic for having guests over or a family movie night, but not cozy for a lazy night of reading a book by the fireplace. You have to make a space for this and fight the floorplan to do so.

- Electronics have shrunk, a modern TV is the size of a painting on the wall, and needs only no horizontal space. Likewise, outside of my son's gaming rig, all the computers are laptops, so, out with the beautiful wood desks and in with the modern ergonomic stand-up desk.

As far as the new home went, almost a year later, the areas where we've made effort to put "life on display" feel great - A huge photo wall with shelves for chotskys and nicnaks, a loft decorated with posters and props from my kid's theater productions, an office with a wall covered with photos and guitars. Life is kind of messy. I guess making home a little more like life really helps.

Or, if you have ever been to a wedding and wondered why everybody started talking louder and louder and it's hard to understand, a room with too large reverb time is a very probable causes. This is very draining mentally.

The same goes for living spaces, especially since newer homes tend to use lots of smooth surfaces like glass, tiles and concrete, which increase reverb time a lot.

Book shelves, curtains and furniture will increase a room's diffusiveness and reduce reverb time, making rooms feel so much better.

For instance actual lighting designers look with contempt at the kind of lighting mentioned in the article as a 1970's trend, that was in turn influenced by the 1930's Bauhaus.

Modern lighting uses layered lighting to create a cozy ambience and human friendly small pools of warm illumination.

See : https://talalighting.com/blogs/journal/how-to-layer-light-in...

On the one hand, "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" - What, isn't it just the opposite? Coastlines and many plants are famously fractal, and in general, if you zoom into nature you will see a lot of detail, while in artificial objects you will often see a uniform sufrace.

On the other hand, "Repetitive grids, stark contrasts, and uniform surfaces have replaced the organic variation of earlier styles" - Okay, I get that grids are bad, but if the problem is too much detail and visual stimulation, why are uniform sources a problem? Is high complexity good or bad?

The only clear ideas that I take from this is that grids = bad, and flickering LED lightning = bad (and I don't really know how to choose LEDs that don't flicker...).

Doesn’t it increase the details in nature due to all the imperfections vs simple patterns made by humans?

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.

This is what I've always felt too, but if you talk to any lighting "expert", they'll say "no that's simply not the case with LED lighting since the year... 2009 or whatever ...". Highly suspect.

The headline picture in that article is pure hell for me.

https://www.redbullmusicacademy.com/lectures/don-buchla-pass...

I suppose it's worth double checking if the 60 Hz was just leaking into the measurement rig. Or autism, for that matter. But Don was great and I've always loved this interview, so I'm sharing.

Those things are also just ugly.

I don't think this is at all a coincidence when it comes to office planning and design. It is purposefully exclusionary

Modern offices are just social/business experiments about what a human will put up with to earn a wage and to optimise for the most desired employees. Most offices I've worked at have a majority of these issues:

- Horrible decor mentioned in the article

- Insufficient peak-time toilet capacity

- Zero accounting for the sun's rays (screen glare, solar gain)

- Poor acoustics

- Horrible overhead lighting

- Broken AC in heat waves, lack of natural air cooling in winter (yay, dried sinuses and gloves in winter!)

- Meeting rooms with insufficient fresh air

- Zero design to reduce spreading of viral diseases

- Constant visual distractions

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.

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.

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 the 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.

Geometrical design (especially the ones with grids/vectors everywhere) are not minimalistic but tiring, really tiring.

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Not sentences. AI slop.