[l0b0]

No mention of usability/accessibility in the interior/architecture section, and barely a mention of regulation and cost. But it's expensive and difficult to come up with an interior/architecture which is user friendly and accessible, while conforming to regulations written in blood. So of course people with finite money are going to copy and paste existing designs. Doorways, corridors, corners, inclines, bathrooms, etc safe and fit for small children, the elderly, the visually impaired, people in wheelchairs, and so on. Items positioned so that inhabitants/users/visitors/customers can use their intuition to navigate the space, rather than having to ask someone all the time. It should be expected and natural to reuse.

On a related note, I suspect a lot of people these days assume that most "alternative" things are unusual for the sake of being unusual, and not actually some stroke of genius. Not saying they are always right, but there's certainly a lot of alt-crap out there.

[api]

Good catch re: cost. I bet every medieval peasant's home looked the same, but the homes of the aristocracy were different and varied. Novelty is expensive and/or time consuming.

The same is true in industrial design too. If you use common designs you can often build your product from off the shelf parts, reuse already deployed manufacturing processes, etc. A fully unique and novel design would require retooling, re-testing for things like product safety, etc.

What we are seeing is perhaps a post-industrial, clean, technologically advanced peasantry.

Of course my observation may be baloney... do all super rich peoples' homes look the same? What does Jeff Bezos' house look like? I've seen pictures of the interiors of super yachts and there's definitely some sameness. Of course there you're dealing with more engineering constraints. "The ocean designs boats."

> I suspect a lot of people these days assume that most "alternative" things are unusual for the sake of being unusual, and not actually some stroke of genius.

It's also often the recycling of some old trope.

Original genius exists but it's pretty rare.

[connicpu]

At the very least all the homes in one village probably looked very similar, since in those times the exact aesthetic would be subject to the availability of local materials.

[avgDev]

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the International Building code. There is a reason everything is starting to look the same, safety, building code, access to this information and globalization all play a part.

If you perform a surgery a certain way and it proves to be cost efficient with great results, other surgeons will study it. They no longer need novel or different ways. As information spreads other surgeons do the same thing. That treatment now becomes standardized across the globe.

Same thing is happening to cities. Additionally, often top firms will work on projects globally.

Another interesting example is Hyundai/Kia/Genesis. They hired a lot of German talent. Their car designs are extremely popular now and resemble German cars. Elantra N has been designed under Bierman, who worked for BMW on the M division. Now, the Elantra N is an absolute bargain that can compete with more expensive cars on the track.

[CharlieDigital]

You can still choose different colors, finishes, and flourishes.

It's not just that things are now structurally similar, but also homogenized along the design vector.

[mrob]

The modern interior design with hard surfaces everywhere is worse for usability/accessibility because it reflects sound, increasing noise levels. This is especially a problem in restaurants, some of which are loud enough to cause hearing damage.

[aspenmayer]

Hard nonporous surfaces are easier to clean, sanitize, and maintain, which is why you find these kinds of surfaces everywhere in professional settings, especially anything to do with food or medicine. Anything that isn't able to be cleaned and sanitized in those settings is usually single use disposable.