I had a discussion regarding this some time ago with my grandchild who has an ADHD diagnosis. She has troubles being in noisy (especially visually) environments, yet she finds my home (relatively large home full of books, music always playing etc) comforting. She explained that all this stuff in my home is interesting for her and speaks with her - "It's you and grandma, it's full of stories". But the very modern and "must be comforting" environment in school full of patterns and pictures drawn on walls etc is just irritating – "There is no stories, just noise".

I am skeptical this is the origin of modern decor. The trend away from ornamentation, toward simplicity, flatness, etc in design goes back several generations and transcends interior design.

If the thesis was true, we'd expect rich people who will never be compelled to move against their will, or to move into less space, would prefer cluttered homey interiors, and poor people would prefer sparse & modern. In reality, the biggest boosters of modern decor are rich people.

My parents lived in the same house for 40 years, my entire childhood was there. My grandparents (both sets) lived in their house for 50 years. I can't comprehend how Americans keep moving for jobs or to upgrade or to get to a better school district. Surely you want some permanence? Get to know your neighbors?

Edit yes I did move around in my twenties, but that stopped at 30.

This resonates with me. I enjoy being at my grandparents’ home. And it’s exactly as you mentioned, if I would describe all the stuff in the living room it’d be called “cluttered”. Yet it feels “homey” and I feel pretty relaxed whenever I sit there to read a book.

And then on my side, for the past 15 years I moved to a new place about every 2-3 years. Never really invested in making it feel “homey” because I’m not sure how much space I’d have in the next place I move to.

I think there's a lot of unappreciated benefits in "staying put." Of course if you're living in a bad situation that might not be true, and it might not be good for your career or for other material reasons, but it can be good for your mental health. My parents owned one house, and we never moved. I grew up there and I still own it. I don't live there currently but every time I am in that house I'm calm, relaxed, and comfortable almost immediately. It's nothing fancy, just a normal ranch house, but it's very familiar and full of memories.

I see where you are coming from and I think this is an interesting observation. Especially when talking about companies and people moving apartments every year.

I grew up in a house full of the clutter that you describe as comforting, but for me it felt smothering. I recently inherited the house I grew up in and now have it set up much less cluttered. I don’t plan to live anywhere else anytime soon, but for me the lack of clutter and clear spaces are much more comforting.

I am definitely not a fan of crazy colors or patterns or bad lighting either though.

A home you inhabit for a long time molds to your day-to-day life. The objects you surround yourself with are not a design choice, but a series of practical solutions to everyday problems. A house becomes a home when you absent-mindedly put down your favourite teacup, and it falls on the coaster you put there five years ago. There's a pillow that makes your reading chair fit just right. The art on the walls was curated over years, and each piece means something.

Modern decor is what happens when you just go on Pinterest and outsource taste for a place you don't own and don't expect to live in for long. It feels sterile because it does not represent any specific person, only an algorithmically-designed aesthetic built from off-the-shelf components.

I help immigrants move to Germany, and I think that people only become Berliners when they can put their own art on the walls. It means that they finally get a sense of permanence, and have a space of their own that they want to invest in. It changes your whole perception of the city you live in.

I see strange market forces where companies need to be trendy, so they absorb what's in the air, and then people kinda have no choice but to buy it. Nobody really wanted to but it materializes.

Around me every house now has tall anthracite fully closed fences. It's gloomy as hell, streets went from cute garden with wood fences to lock-down mode in a few years. It's all the same model, all the same vibe..

The article is about office decor, not home decor. While I don't love "modern decor," I don't think offices are meant to feel comforting like a home owned for generations.

What design trends can be attributed to people's desire to pick up and move at a moment notice?

> The article doesn't touch much on why modern decor emerged as it did

The theory I subscribe to is a few fold:

1) People like to buy "generic" homes that are easier to renovate/personalize 2) But then they don't end up personalizing, because they're afraid to tank it's market value 3) Thus homes stay boring and generic

The article also doesn't touch on whether visually cluttered "traditional" decor is better for people affected by those conditions.

I found the office in the picture quite pleasant to look at. Not comforting and homey but suitable as a work environment.

> It's a market response where everyone needs to (or feels the need to) pick up and move at a moment's notice.

You see the same thing with cars. People choose to buy (or more commonly lease!) a car for a few years and before they've even decided to buy it they're planning to sell it. This is why there are so many sad grey cars on the road - pick a colour that's easy to sell! Don't get anything too wild, it might not sell! What if you can't sell it because it's red or blue?!!? Don't go too crazy with that very pale blue tinted grey, they might not be able to sell it for as much and you won't get much from the leasing company!

There's a guy in my town who has a Porsche 992, it's only a few years old. He bought it as his retirement present to himself when he packed in his job at the start of COVID. It has all the options, and it has custom paint.

It is what I can only describe as Budget-Conscious Prosthetic Limb beige.

That kind of pinky-beige colour for NHS hearing aid plastic.

It cost him 1500 quid to even get it mixed, thousands extra to have it sprayed that colour.

"But what if it doesn't sell?" people say to him, "What if people don't like the colour?"

He doesn't care, he's going to drive it for the rest of his life. It'll be someone else's problem to sell once he dies.

A lot of the new designs are actually practical.... be it striped carpets or patterned bus seats, they're designed to hide stains and wear. If eg. bus seats were made from white fabric, no one would want to sit in them after a month or two of use, same for eg. carpets in places with many people.

> It's a market response where everyone needs to (or feels the need to) pick up and move at a moment's notice.

Yes, but it's deeper than that. Two broad reasons, though your point here is a good one.

1. We don't, particularly in the west, have the skills, shops/craftsmen, or access to resources to make things like we used to. It's a positive network effect where prices go up, folks don't do the work anymore, and so prices go up, and things get more unaffordable, and so forth until there's only a handful of folks anywhere that can build the furniture, decor, or houses that you allude to. Companies can't make this stuff and as they chase never ending globalized supply chains and increasingly fewer commodities or natural resources they market and sell plainer and plainer things - modernist styles and modernist architecture. With so many people in the world competing for the same products and resources, it's incredibly expensive to build anything "real" or with much detail or thought. So companies just cheap out and create surrogate products which nobody is ever happy with.

2. The changes we see in style can be attributed to changes in politics and civilization. Who we are and what we think of ourselves. It's bad or even politically dangerous to build ornate buildings or purchase expensive or ornate pieces for your home. How could you build a beautiful building when there are people starving?!?! (you see a version of this with rocket companies - how can Jeff Bezos spend his money launching rockets when Social Security is underfunded!!?!?)

Any sufficiently famous building or person who liked nice shit was a "colonizer" and "bad person" in some form or because of some argument and then of course over time folks just hide their wealth (stealth wealth, millionaire next door) and we pride ourselves on appearing poor, acting poor, and naturally, we create poor civilizations without much to aspire to. When was the last time you wore a suit and tie? Better yet, who in your town can even make a suit? Who is going to die for strip malls and parking lots? Who wants to invest in their neighborhood when you know instinctively it's just a house and it's not something you will really pass down to your children (they will just sell that suburban home you have). Americans in particular spend thousands annually to travel to countries in Europe for example, and to visit their gardens and nice buildings, which themselves are vestiges of an age when western civilization aspired to more, and why do they only do that instead of investing in their own gardens and making their own nice places for people to visit? We do this of course to some extent - it's big country after all, but those who understand this and why it's important are fewer and further between.

The article does explicitly state that the brain doesn't adapt to this.

From the article:

"And when the brain encounters something it can’t process efficiently, it doesn’t simply adapt. Brain imaging studies cited in the review show it generates stronger neural responses in visual areas, consumes more oxygen, and in some people produces pain, distortion, or worse."

I think there were studies on this, leading to, among other things, painting control rooms seafoam green to reduce visual fatigue. This implies that people don't simply adjust (or that the studies were too limited).

I like this, but to play the devil’s advocate: How does that mesh with usually having just one giant overhead light (the sun) outdoors?

The most important aspect of a room's acoustic performance are its dimensions. Rectangular rooms have 3 axial modes that dominate. These modes are easily excited and store energy which you perceive as rumbling, booming, droning, etc. A very small input can get a large room going like crazy if it is mechanically coupled to the room in any way. Even decoupled sources (your neighbor's home theater system) can easily excite the axial modes.

Any dimension longer than 28' is going to pass the infrasonic threshold (20hz). This tends to be OK as you go further into it. Humans are sensitive to infrasound, but often not at this level of intensity. However, designing rooms with all dimensions larger than this exceeds the limits of most practical residential real estate.

An 8' dimension would give you a 70hz fundamental. This is quite audible, but also in a range of frequencies where treatments like bass traps are very effective.

The room dimension range between 10' and 28' is where the dragons live. These frequencies are audible and significantly more difficult to treat. They will cut right through treatments like rockwool and mass loaded vinyl as if they didn't exist.

One of the best mitigations is to simply not have rectangular rooms. The second best is to have really small ones. Older homes tend to feel cozier because the room fundamentals are not in that weird range.

We had this when we moved from an old brick office to a new bigger one full of glass panels. We had to fill the new office with random planters and other stuff or it was uncomfortably echoey

So many bars & restaurants don't care enough about this.

Possibly the first convincing argument I have ever heard in favor of the materialistic accumulative American lifestyle.

Natural patterns are often fractal.

I’m pretty sure they mean perceptible complexity at the level of the human eye. Of course, everything has quarks and leptons in infinitely complex patterning.

Yeah, "shockingly" the LLM summary has it wrong. The paper is really focusing on luminance contrast: the variation in contrast within a natural object tends to be narrower than the variation between objects, and the neural metabolism of our visual system tends to be optimized towards a natural range of contrasts. Modern high-contrast decor and lighting is way out of natural balance, and for some people it can be exhausting.

"Visual complexity" is just wrong: simple black / hot pink stripes are visually exhausting upon immediate perception, whereas the monochromatically brown detail of a tree trunk is only visually exhausting on close inspection.

God, what a useless website. I hate LLMs. The actual paper is here: https://www.mdpi.com/2411-5150/10/2/34

I can’t decide if it’s obnoxious or beautiful irony that drives home the idea of the article.

It's time to start using an ad blocker, I don't see any ads on that page with Firefox and uBlock Origin.

I find it easy to detect. If I wave my hand in front of my face quickly, the movement looks choppy instead of being just a blur. I can often tell lighting is cheep LED even without doing this. Movement just feels off. It is mildly annoying, but I can mostly ignore it.

> This is what I've always felt too, but if you talk to any lighting "expert", they'll say "no that's simply not the case with LED lighting since the year... 2009 or whatever ...". Highly suspect.

Way before the Internet I had games running at 50 Hz (PAL). And we fully knew the difference between, say, a 2D game scrolling at full-frame rate and a game running a 25 fps: we could tell immediately. Same for intros and demos.

Yet the number of times I had armchair experts explain me, despite me literally seeing with my own eyes the difference, that "the human eye cannot discern more than 24 fps". Teachers. Friends of my parents. My parents.

Later on I could tell a CRT running Windows @ 60 Hz vs 75 Hz in a split second: I simply could tell.

And still: same armchair experts "you cannot detect that, your eyes cannot physically detect more than 24 fps, because science!".

It's the absolute worst thing: you see something with your own eyes, other people see it with their own eyes. And yet "experts" explain to you "that is impossible".

While you could fucking literally demo it to them: but they're not interested "becuz it's impossssssible".

I hate LED lighting. Or at least I hate having only LED lighting. But there's IMO a simple trick to make the lighting much warmer and reduce the flicker (even if you don't consciously detect it, like 60 fps vs 75 fps: it's simply there) and still keep electricity consumption in check: just have one incandescent light bulb per room. Maybe two in the living room.

This immediately gives the feeling of a much warmer place (and, technically speaking, it is actually... warmer, ah!).

You can still legally, even in the EU, buy "special purpose", incandescent lamps that give a very nice warm yellowish light.

Just don't forget to wait if you plan to touch one after turning it off because they really get very warm.

Now of course you do that and you'll have sore people say: "even one incandescent lamp is too much, you should be 100% LED, not 95% LED, to save the planet!" followed by "we should ask the EU (and others) to ban once and for all ALL incandescent lightbulbs".

Basically: go order on Amazon or whatever a few small "special purpose" incandescent light and some little lamp to put them in. Put one in each room.

You'll thank me later.

They are a fad, like many before, and not the best one due to copy&paste uniformity. Since its used so aggressively and so often, many places look weirdly similar like if many people bought exactly same Ikea furniture. Proper wood like oak can be very pretty in many forms but this is not.

In future it will clearly mark the era of (re)construction.

Somehow we posted the same comment, I didn't even have a look on the whole HN comment list. Yes, indeed, we are used to look at leaves/branches/trees with self-similar structures (and mountains/rivers and lightnings).

You're confusing what they mean: it's not the flickering that you can easily notice, it's the flickering of lights "fps".

To see those, you need a digital camera (e.g. your phone)

We are?

The stripey wood-and-black-rubber 'sound dampening' panels are all the rage these days and I don't really understand it.

Our management had the bright idea to put these things in all our meeting rooms on the wall with the TVs we use for remote calls. People started getting sea sick looking at them. Of course removing them would mean the management made a mistake, so they will stay there until the next bright idea hits.

I so agree! As someone into photography, light is everything. It can even turn oversaturated fabrics into more uniform and less screaming colors. The diffusion of the light flattens things, but the interesting angles create interesting shadows and shapes. So much can be done with light, but so many offices have the boring flat ceiling lights. It seems to be hard for the office space designers to invest a bit of time into islands that can have lamps. What's interesting is that many libraries seem to be more accomodating in this regard.

Either way, light is everything, but it is treated like an afterthought.

The degree to which an environment is straining is possibly merely coincidentally related to the decor part.. and almost entirely rooted in architecture. Buildings with terrible architecture merely tend to simultaneously also be equipped with horrible color and texture choices.

I suspect besides objectively annoying flickering lights, the difference is primarily made in the immediate, subconscious and effortless recognition of ubiquitous patterns of function. Which happens in form and proportion first, and only to a lesser degree in color and contrast.

* this is the floor, this is the ceiling * through there, there is the entrance / exit * this is a reception desk

If it takes effort to filter out the noise, the glare to know such simple things, there is less capacity left in our brains to process other "essentially free" tasks.

For one it's not produced by artisans but by machines or processes.

Really, you don't find it plausible that environment could affect mood?

I dont know if the hypothesis in the paper is correct, but it seems clear that environment can affect mood in some cases. There is a reason why night clubs and libraries are decorated differently. From there it seems very plausible other elements of environments could have an affect (perhaps subtle) on mood.

So you thibk light might affect, but something visual.. that we see does not?

Why do you think that? What knowledge/leaning do you have that would add weight to your opinion?

> ... could hardly read it scrolling through in-article ads, banners, etc.

Which is why you can take my adblocker from me when you pry it from my cold dead hands. Much of the modern web is largely straight-up hostile without a proper adblocker these days.

I use reader mode on most sites where it is possible. It makes a big difference in most cases. Readable font size and face, good contrast, and comfortable margins. I don't know why so many sites ignore good practices on this stuff.

A clean reading experience appears to be a unique selling point these days

If it's any consolation this article was written by an LLM, so reading it is a waste of time regardless. HN should just autoblock this entire scumbag domain.

The paper itself is open access: https://www.mdpi.com/2411-5150/10/2/34

They make it hard to find what you want on purpose in hopes you will be distracted and buy other crap along the way. I think it must work on most consumers.

I have the same reaction to it as you.

i think theres something in peoples mindset or genetics that creates this difference. my experience is like the opposite of yours. i dont exactly love malls but its one of the things that can satisfy the part of my brain that just wants more.

never been diagnosed with adhd but i have this thing where most of life is not stimulating enough to keep me interested. to be clear this is not a screen addiction, i dont feel specific pressure to pull up my phone and i can go a long time without it. scrolling is only a fallback when im not talking with someone (that includes writing like right now), working on something interesting, outside with friends, playing games, working out, you get the idea.

creative things like coding and drawing almost always work. movies and football only if i care about it emotionally. alcohol helps some too. but a lot of activities like reading a book are just not enough. i would describe it as a non specific addiction to something that might be dopamine but that still wouldnt fully explain things.

when i go to the mall or the shopping street or a bar theres so much going on that i finally feel comfortable. on the other hand i almost never feel overwhelmed. my family is not like that (they absolutely hate shopping) but i think some of my friends are, never asked them about it. i dont know if its a type of neurodivergence or a learned behavior or something even stranger.

sounds like a great lead for psychology research.

Whenever I go shopping for a single, most trivial item, I really need to psyche myself up. Those critical moments just upon entering the store are the key.

Because immediately upon walking in the door, you are immersed in a "shopping environment". Everything you smell, hear, see, touch is geared to making you spend more and purchase more and grab more useless stuff off the shelves.

Even in a Goodwill or similar thrift store you are subjected to these merchandising tricks.

I have found that keeping a very good household inventory on a spreadsheet is critical. If I have this spreadsheet on my phone and I refer to it, before venturing into aisles, then I know exactly what I need to purchase, and where to go to find it. Sticking to the shopping list, I can avoid the needless purchase temptations.

At Costco when I'd go with my parents, it was the custom of the cashiers to ask, "did you find everything alright?" and my father would always joke, that if enough people answered in the affirmative, that was their cue to rearrange the store and shuffle everything around, so that shoppers would get lost, and not being able to find what they want, would discover more useless stuff that they would pull off the shelves on impulse.

It also doesn't hurt to follow the advice of "never shop while hungry"!

Just go to Costco: they only stock 4,500 items compared to Walmart's 100,000 per store

has it gotten better in the LED era?