Why All Products Look The Same: Industrial Design Trends

Why All Products Look The Same: Industrial Design Trends

Industrial Design trends are heavily influenced by online social media platforms. This video talks about the implications behind the phenomenon of algorithmic populism. Product design and culture will never be the same again. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing!

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John Mauriello has been working professionally as an industrial designer since 2010. He is an Adjunct Professor of industrial design at California College of the Arts. All content was written and edited by John Mauriello.

Watch the Death of Detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxVKiteS2AI&

50 Comments

  1. Rounded corner is awesome. Rounded corner is my hardline. Rounded corner is a wonder, Rounded corner is timeless, Rounded corner is honest, Rounded corner is rounded and that’s what makes it awesome. And accept that rounded corners can make most of the stuff look cool and complete the composition.

  2. No! You can’t simply observe online marketplaces and say, “There, I’ve found my looking glass into how things work!” Everything online is gamified and manipulated and it has not much to say about the real world. It’s a distorted perspective. Only fools can take online to heart.

  3. Everyone should be excluding pinterest from their image searches anyway in my opinion. There are even browser plugins for it.

  4. One other thing is that the design of Pinterest itself influences the types of images that get popular on there. How there are multiple images put next to each other in rounded boxes, with infinite scroll. This is compared to a double page spread in a interior design magazine, in which the intended aesthetics diverge despite sharing the goal of user retention

  5. Are you dissing the monkey feeding machine …
    Oooh, monkey like banana. Here monkey have a banana!
    Oooh, monkey ate banana, monkey must like banana!
    Here monkey have a banana ….

  6. This seems to be the defining trait of adapters and cables on Amazon.
    -silver ‘metal’ case
    -black plastic edging and inlays
    -‘gold’ contacts for cable ends

  7. You literally showed cars from the 50’s that all look the exact same. You aren’t wrong, but it’s like watching someone see a king tide for the first time. They always think it’s a huge moment that will change the beach forever, but then they find out it happens every couple of months and have been happening forever. We are just syncing, as we sync we unify, as that becomes more and more inline someone breaks the mold (you can only have a mold if it’s uniform… hence the phrase) and everything changes. We are getting close, maybe 2-3 years and we will see another huge design shift. We (society) currently want that sci-fi look. Soon that will go away.

    Like I said, not wrong about the similarity but wrong about the problem/solution/scale. IMO

  8. That’s why Tesla looks like a cheap plastic Toy and Porsche looks like beauty in it’s purest form. Because those so called "designers" have no creativity on their own. That’s why they have to turn to "minimalism". Which in itself describes the problem head on. Because it’s just an excuse for not coming up with something better than "as little design as possible".

  9. Enroll in my online industrial design course, Form Fundamentals. https://bit.ly/335vsqO …I’ll teach you about visual storytelling, design language, and form. It will ultimately make you a designer that is better prepared for the professional world.

  10. Well it’s either this or a competition of "who’s got the better marketing"
    at this point idk which is worse.
    this is why I’ve advocated for a kind of "design police/judge/enforcement center" where they decide top 10 products that may exist in whatever color you want and anything less functionally can go to hell as long as you’re not buying it from an artisan, choice paralysis is real

  11. I think you went too far looking for an explanation on this one. The reality is more boring and simple: it’s really just that a couple of giant chinese megafactories are being subcontracted litterally every piece of electronics produced in the world right now. These factories have standard templates and components and they will straight up tell their contractors what can and cannot be done. Whoever puts their logo on the final product really doesn’t matter that much in the end, the same factories produce apple, samsung, huawei you name it, they couldn’t make a novel design if you wanted to because those factories will straight up refuse to do anything that doesn’t allow them to use their infrastructure at 100% capacity for any amount of time and changing anything in the design would be inefficient.
    It’s also the reason blueprints for phones are so secretive and you can’t repair them; the companies have to keep up the charade that there is an actual difference between the products and that they’re not litterally all the same down to the chips and electronics except for the 2 or 3 features that they market around.
    Reality is boring.

  12. I’ve been a brand strategist and designer for around 15 years, and noticed the same trend towards ‘blandification’. There seems to finally be some pushback, as seen in examples such as Burberrys logo, as well as heritage maximalist brands in the luxury space. Given that many mid market consumer trends echo luxury directions, perhaps we’ll see a greater shift… love your channel by the way!

  13. Great thoughts! Let me also point that a connected process which I call "instagram design" is also happening. With this words I mean that only a disappearing percentage of all of the most-liked designs can be really purchased. And even the smallest number of them are purchased by those who’ve pressed the like button under them. Sometimes those "likers" even have no intention to purchase them as long as it is THE cool picture they really like. This could be funny if it didn’t affect the stakeholders 🙂

  14. I wish I could pull off a High Expectations Asian Father who got 100% in Math & Comp Sci Honours and disown social media algorithms from the definition of the word "algorithm" and find a new word for that meaning.

  15. Yeah idk man If I compare the designs I see today compared to as a kid in the early 200’s, HO MAN they are better today, idk what everyone was thinking with the over complex, cheap plasticy designs with bits of transparency here and there and just really undestinct wobbily moulds??

    But, if I look back at designs of things like radios tv’s reccord players from like the 30’s 40’s yeah like, what where thoughs guys on how come there designs were all soo fricken stunning?

  16. I’m studying it, main reason is resource preservation and stuff. It’s really frustrating because when you want to make something even sliiightly decorative in your product the profs shit on me for it saying it doesn’t add anything to the product so we all end up with scandinavian bs

  17. This is happening in almost every artistic areas. Music, Cinema, Poetry, etc… They are all suffering from this homogenization ditacted by the algorthims.

  18. So you are saying if I look long enough at examples of a trend I don’t like I feel start to like it? Because I feel my tastes are much more static that that.

  19. And nowadays an Amazon checkout page looks suspiciously similar to the Google app, which looks really similar to the…honestly most of my examples after this are all Android apps, so maybe I’m overblowing how prevalent some of that design-blight may be.

    Maybe that won’t bother me if the interfaces all eventually wind up more consistent and understandable.

  20. As a consumer, everything looks the same. I’m just trying to find the product that does what I need it to do without wasting my money on something that will be in the trash in less than a year. Nothing to me today is aesthetically pleasing. It’s all dull and boring. I said the same thing about cars in the 90s and that hasn’t changed. I guess growing up in the 80s had the looking at the world in brighter colors. And yeah, social media is turning us all into robots. Those of us who don’t use it (outside of YouTube for me) see a depressing landscape of automatons. Sigh…

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