Picked a great time to follow my dream as an industrial designer, only to graduate during COVID and realize that not a single company actually cares to improve the user experience of their products or systems.
Feels like I got a more exclusive and more expensive art degree.
Go create something, im not sure the market is but I want non dominant designs and less dark patterns.
Boring is cheap. Look at the way houses and apartments are being built now. Soviet Bloc Block Housing. No need for architects if the preexisting plans are pre-approved.
Yay capitalism.
Edit: a lot of people are missing the nuance. Surprise.
except at least the commie blocks were affordable lol
“cheap to build” meant “cheap to rent”, not “our housing company is making record-breaking profits! 😃”
There were not “affordable”, they were allocated. One could somehow improve the chance of being “given” that via connections.
And if you changed a workplace, it could be taken back. It wasn’t yours.
the apt i live in isnt mine either. plus i have to pay to live on it.
OK. Suppose so.
I’ve just been reminded that in the wonderful 70s people felt a bit similarly suppressed and the future dim as compared to 60s as we do now as compared to 00s.
Nothing is new.
What is important, though, is that nothing existing has been given to us be benevolent or harsh, kind or cruel gods. It has all been built by people just like us.
To dream and to work are the most important parts.
Been reading Vonnegut again and it’s astonishing how he’s calling out the exact same societal ills we have today. Only thing he missed was global warming and that’s because many in the 70s thought we were headed for an ice age.
Disco Elysium is a more recent look.
Blame minimum parking requirements. An 800 ft2 2-bedroom apartment is really 1200 ft2, when the zoning code requires one parking space per bedroom.
It’s funny to think that when everything is made more cheap, the more they cost.
Soviet Bloc Block Housing
Yep, 35 storeys and 400 units of plain beige whatever.
But you’re missing the value of the modern mixed-use building. They just finished one nearby and it’s insane:
- ground-floor light commercial - a pizza place, a daycare and I think a pet store in there so far
- parking is secure and underground, with a loading bay,
- 2 floors of professional - physios and notaries and some ad-hoc wework space
- 30 floors of apartments
- an entire floor of guest space - airBnB units, essentially - and common play-space.
All these pictures are accurate as I remember from the tour:
The units will look more familiar if you’ve been to Northern Europe, but a bit bigger. We looked at a 1150sqft 3bd unit with huge triple-pane windows and - 2024 building code - A/C built-in. If you don’t count a garage - underground parking - the bigger ones are like small ranchers stacked on one another – in concrete, so you don’t notice you have neighbours.
They’re not Bloc blocks; they put a few of these together and they have a small city.
Except with supposed technological advancement and bigger efficiency it’s supposed to become more affordable on a competitive market, yet it doesn’t. It just becomes cheaper for the construction companies.
Soviet serial housing was better planned. There were intended green spaces and microdistricts (those didn’t turn out very well, it became apparent that they are convenient to small crime).
It’s not really “capitalism”, it’s an oligarchic system where everybody having power feels that it’s very good for them. Ask Sergey Brin if he wants to change anything. It’s the same in construction and everywhere, because why wouldn’t it be - an oligarchization of one sphere of economy leads to the same in others.
At the same time the ideas of authority and law in the Soviet space were kinda similar to what your “land of the free” is developing now. Easy to forget that in USSR your boss knew all your history of past employment, and when you’d be leaving could write something so nasty there that you’d never work anything better than janitor after them. Or that a kid living with their family in one small room of a communal apartment in a Khruschev-era serial building could go as guest to a kid living with their family in a three-room apartment in a Stalin-era special building, both given by the state, see and eat something there that they would never at home, and that was the normal degree of inequality in the USSR.
BTW, yeah, I’ve gotten a taste of mentioning the Soviet elites the justice against whom still hasn’t been restored in any way, - so my family lived in a two room apartment in a Stalin-era building (my grand-grandfather was a railways analog of an infantry general, and my grandmother is one of the architects of the Boguchan hydroelectric station), and judging from Wikipedia, Sergey Brin’s family lived in a three room apartment in such (it’s also there who his parents were). That’s about who those immigrants were who could afford to be otkazniks for a few months\years before leaving for the USA. Jackson-Vanik was basically targeted at a small subset of the Soviet elite with Jewish ancestry. Soviet antisemitism was sort of a Soviet version of “first world problems”. Again, my grandmother’s sister’s family also emigrated then.
And in western stereotypical portrayals of “how people live in (ex-)USSR” of late 80s and early 90s they too often show such living places. As if that were normal.
Yet the absolute majority didn’t.
So, one of the reasons Putin could do what he did, - the absolute majority saw how people who didn’t live too badly in the first place got an opportunity to be “liberated” and play “discount USA”, while their own workplaces which would feed them somehow stopped doing that.
It’s a very particular feeling of collective injustice when those who benefited most from a system dismantle it and blame it on those who benefited less.
So, getting back to Soviet bloc housing, interpeted as Khruschev-era. It wasn’t so bad, considering the green around and the fact that people would move there from actual wooden barracks. And Stalin-era housing wasn’t bad at all and still isn’t.
Calling the big grey bezels of old TVs stylish is certainly an interesting take.
While your average early/mid 2000’s CRT TV is certainly not stylish, I do appreciate the buttons and convenient access to a set of inputs and the headphone jack. Today’s TVs are all form over function, which is especially annoying since the form is just a black slab.
Yeah, and personally, I don’t feel any wish to go back to skeuomorphism. It is funny to look back to and feel some nostalgia, but I think it would look cheap now if they did it like 15 years ago. Maybe iOS’ glassy-ui will create some elements that people like about it, but they luckily did not move back to busy ui element backgrounds.
I do partially agree with his buttons and app-points. I dislike how we are forced to download apps for everything, including the questionable tracking software.
Look at an old colorful iMac running an early version of Mac OS X. The decisions made in its appearance were unnecessary but pleasant. The aqua interface was functional but pretty. It played with textures in fun ways that weren’t distracting, like pinstriping in menus that matched the machine itself, shiny jelly buttons and icons that looked more alive and interesting. While it can be said that they leaned in too heavily to this sometimes (brushed metal and stitched leather were…a lot) the overall experience was engaging. People were trying new things and there was variety, even from a company demanding a uniform market like Apple.
Now look where we are in 2025. We have Liquid Glass, which is just loud and in my way, inefficient and less functional. We have AI everywhere which does everything we could already do but without any accountability or responsibility so there’s no consequences when it fucks up like if a human did. We have companies competing against eachother to see who can most effectively suck the life out of their customers rather than who can make the most appealing product the get customer buy in.
Nobody cares about the consumer anymore. It’s all just a big money laundering operation for shareholders. Business majors ruined the world.
I do partially agree with his buttons and app-points. I dislike how we are forced to download apps for everything, including the questionable tracking software.
I also agree with this.
Flagship stuff is just optimized.
You probally wouldn’t be surprised to find out a bunch of interesting designs of the past had durability and longevity issues.
Nah, flagship stuff is overpriced. 3x the price for a bit better camera AI and a glass back that breaks after a drop from 10cm.
Yeah people often mention the funny phone designs from the 2000’s but they also praise the Nokia 3310 for its reliability.
Seems like a good time to plug one of my favored youtoobers, famed former NBA player Drew Gooden:
Booo. Thought it was legit.
Drew is legit. No, he never actually played in the NBA. The name confusion is just one of his long-running jokes.
Edit: clarity
dude admits that it took him a week of suffering to go to the tv setting. no wonder tech is no fun for him.
I’m 50/50 on this one. On one hand, yes, absolutely. On the other, there’s lots more to the design than just its outline. Materials used, touch and feel, hardware switches… I remember holding a very new but compact iPhone a few years back. It felt so fucking good. Sturdy. Those rounded corners were actually a metal band going all around the phone. Not too big, not too small. Not too thin, either.
I also sorely miss the Nokia N9 in this picture - another of these devices you have to actually hold in your hand, or know a little more about, to appreciate the design. I mean the design is cool to even look at, but the shell is also carved out from a hard plastic block. That’s beyond sturdy, and feels very good in your hand.
Function > durability > cost > tons of other things > “interestingness”
I like it boring. I get to customise a blank slate how I want. I really rather not have things in my life that are by someone else’s interpretation of “good” design. Ending up with more shit like my Dyson, or a modem trying to be the centrepiece of the living area…
First of all, my modem sits on a pedestal in a glass case. Second, you’re wrong. Third, if you can’t get curls to stay with your Dyson air wrap that’s a skill issue, it’s definitely not inferior to a curling iron in every way. -s
Its good. Just how laptop has been solved so is smartphone right now. I like my tiny black bricks, keep your corporate style to yourself.
Smartphone where almost a solved problem til LG stopped making the V20 and made the next one with a sealed battery.
Combine the hardware features of an LG V20 and grapheme is, and you might have a phone actually fucking worth using. I want my DAC and 16 screw disassembly back, fuckers.
Laptop has been solved?, then why are the hinges on most of my laptops garbage that become creaky and eventually break.
I haven’t had a hinge failure on a MacBook for 20 years.
I have two laptops with broken hinges right now. Metal and other materials help with hinge support. plastic and constant use will break most hinges.
I used to do laptop repair, its a pretty common thing to replace.
Samsung Gleam. That was peak cellphone.
My favorite of all the phones I have owned:
Ulefone’s got your back for weird phones.
Rather Unihertz. They basically have just the unusual phones.
Currently I have Ulefone Armor 24, but I’d want something like Oukitel WP100 Titan. Even larger and crazier.
Look at that 33Ah thing:
Almost brick size now. It’s so ridiculous I want it. After all, what I have now isn’t far from if, it’s just that this is even bigger.
3.6cm (1.4 inch) thick, 877g (1.93lbs) heavy.
But somehow it still can’t fit a headphone jack and MicroSD card slot, so that’s a no for me.
I’ve got the Armor 21, giant speaker. Almost upgraded this year when the USB port died, but then I remembered the dock based charging that also exists for some unknown reason. Was looking at one of the Thermal options, just because they’re kind of neat, not that I really have a use case.
I just love that they take some random idea and make a crazy phone.
Lost my Oukitel WP33 Pro. :( Really neat phone, weight like a Colt .45, and about as easy to carry.
“Kirk to Enterprise…”
Many years ago Nokia made a couple prototypes of an official Star Trek communicator phone
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3EN05faZVU
I would do some seriously regrettable things to have one of these that works with modern networks.
team moto razr here!
Those phones were really convenient, taking just as much place in your pocket as needed, screen covered from being scratched by keys and other items.
Actually convenient keyboards.
It’s just that why make ergonomic, optimized for the task, price-efficient things when a piece of useless crap called iPhone makes you more.
I swear, for market economies to work you need to outlaw advertising.
flip phones were great as phones, but terrible as pdas. iPhone combined the two in a non-chunky way (competitors? Palm Treo? Windows Mobile phones?)
I disagree with both.
They were good enough as PDAs, those keyboards’ buttons usually used for navigation are not much different from what’s normal under Android now. Fit in one hand, convenient display angle. They were just ergonomically all around better.
iPhones and Android phones I still have anxiety using.
shows crt with speakers and buttons
Now THIS was design
Idk I kinda like modern minimal / flexible, assuming it works. It’s often easier to customize something in an app than with a bunch of dials. Stuff like hue has shown it possible to make physical buttons to control smart devices, if you want them
Meanwhile he glosses over the fact that Samsung has all the foldables now, and that’s a pretty extreme industrial design in the modern era
