![]() ![]() But perhaps a world designed in this spirit would remind us there is more to life than what our minimalist machines can offer. ![]() Yes, these strange shapes are more visual traffic passing across our screens. Among the works on show were Reebok and Botter’s curvaceous trainers inspired by seashells, and a sublime runway designed by Joana Vasconcelos, where textiles in the form of bulbous tentacles drooped from the ceiling. This revolt has already been brewing for some time, as Paris fashion week recently demonstrated. Anything that does not come easily, or make itself instantly understood. Embrace the organic, the baroque, the maximalist. It’s time for these aesthetic practitioners to break the spell of minimalism, which has made slabs of plastic and glass feel like the natural centre of our existence. Of course tools will always be necessary, and we might as well have good ones, but the goal today is to prevent our tools from taking over our lives.įashion and furniture designers, architects and art directors do not need to limit themselves to the functional requirements of user experience. “User-friendly” is only a virtue in products that reduce us to the status of users. You may be asking, can the answer really be user- unfriendly design? That would be missing the point. Increasingly, successful literature resembles the compact efficiency of the book covers and typefaces in which it is packaged. These trends no doubt point back to the problem of information overload, but they also suggest that minimalism is becoming a cultural sensibility. Popular non-fiction writers like Malcolm Gladwell and Yuval Noah Harari are similarly abstemious in their style, not to mention their habit of streamlining subject matter into big simple ideas. As the writer Stephen Marche observed a few years back, contemporary novelists like Sally Rooney have abandoned the pursuit of a unique voice in favour of concise, vacuum-packed prose that might have been written by anyone. The cult of simplicity has spread beyond the realm of gadgets. Worker turnover is so high that some factories effectively have to replace their entire labour force several times each year. Producing several hundred million iPhones annually breaks human beings. ![]() There is nothing simple about Apple’s supply chain, which consists of around 1.5 million workers, most of them employed by contract manufacturers in China. Minimalist devices may be user-friendly, but their lithium batteries and short lifespans are not friendly to the planet. This inoffensive, tasteful simplicity is a deception. Public spaces are now populated by zombies staring at their phones or locked away in a private world of audio. Together with the iPhone, these white earbuds (owned by three out of four American teenagers) have surely secured Apple the title of history’s most anti-social product designers. And so the social pressures that live in these devices, the demands of work and the pull of the online crowd, have overrun both private and public life.Īirpods are another step in this conquest: a piece of tech discreet enough to allow media consumption wherever we may be. The ultimate example is of course Apple’s own smartphones, laptops and tablets, whose subtle forms and neatly organised contents are tempting to use in any situation. It has provided aesthetic cover for a gamified capitalist ethic – produce, consume, compete – to penetrate ever deeper into our lives. In this way, minimalism has led us to mistake efficiency for beauty. Across the board, corporate giants have stripped their logos of detail, from Burger King to Warner Bros, Burberry to Google. The same principle operates in the digital world, where graphic design is streamlined into easily digestible blobs of colour and bold lettering, lubricating the endless flow of media. Even sex toys look like Apple products now.ĭomestic life is more and more a dance with machines, which listen to our conversations and monitor our sleep. Sleek devices pile up in the aspirational home, never quite amounting to clutter: KitchenAid juicers and Nespresso coffee machines, Alexas and Google Assistants, smart speakers and smart alarm clocks. Science and Technical Research and DevelopmentĬontemporary minimalism gives new life to the motto “less is more”.Infrastructure Management - Transport, Utilities.Information Services, Statistics, Records, Archives.Information and Communications Technology.HR, Training and Organisational Development.Health - Medical and Nursing Management. ![]()
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