I keep reading about 50s/60s/70s design. It’s incredible how much was measured during those decades.
Basically, everything. Everything was measured, observed and noted to design better everything. Better kitchens, better cars, better ways of sitting down. The whole nine and more.
We know everything about living in peace and in an optimum flow today. Our ancestors did the math. We can’t seem to focus on that though.
I was reading about Herman Miller’s chairs. Fantastic sitting from the Eames Shell castles to the Aeron citadels.
The amount of research, prototyping and iteration is staggering. Of course these chairs are phenomenal! They couldn’t possibly have had more data to make decisions. Years in the making. Just to sit right! Sitting everyone (wild spectrum of asses) correctly is quite a challenge. And it’s been done from the late 40s to the late 90s. Do we need more research on that? No. Unless you think you can outsmart decades of experience from the best designers who spent their entire lives doing just that one thing.
Two conclusions. One, it’s a crazy world where we don’t need more things. Rather, we need the best things to be distributed everywhere, and most of those best things were invented in the past. Nothing new is better anymore and if it is, it’s nasty and abusive (say VR or macOS Tahoe).
Two, seeing and reading so much about intelligent folks and smart ideas from decades ago, juxtaposed to this *waves at the current zeitgeist* is making me internally bleed.
Shit is dumb as fuck right now. It’s demonic.