If you've ever been in an home owned for generations, filled with books and knickknacks and heirlooms and family photos, despite the clutter it all feels comforting in a way that modern decor doesn't.
The article doesn't touch much on why modern decor emerged as it did. It's a market response where everyone needs to (or feels the need to) pick up and move at a moment's notice. Companies are either expanding or like to think they'll be expanding soon. People move jobs so often that they have a hard time feeling settled where they are, so they design for that possibility. The modern aesthetic is one of planned impermanence.
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".
My parents lived in the same house for 40 years, my entire childhood was there. My grandparents (both sets) lived in their hours 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?
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.
Only the rich can afford to own nothing/exert effort to have empty space without consequence.
Ordinary folks when presented with an object have to perform a mental calculation over the cost/inconvenience of storage vs. disposal and if wanted again, replacement.
The rich also can afford to keep their minimalist modern spaces clean and clutter-free, through paying staff. These environments tend to look awful when not tended to continuously because a single out-of-place item is so clearly visible.
Cluttered old homes with lots of things all over the place make it a bit less jarring when there's a stack of work left out on a table.
Travel / multiple homes confuse the issue because nobody spends much time on their 5th house they use less than a month per year, so the decoration is mostly outsourced to 3rd parties.
The portion of rich people homes they actually use are often quite cluttered. The simile limitation of needing to walk to a room to use it means spreading out across a huge home gets annoying. Semi public spaces for guests on the other hand can look like hotels because that’s effectively what they are.
This is a false dichotomy. The modern style is a reaction against a distinct and different design aesthetic from what the parent described. Neoclassical, Gothic Revival, and Rococo are more ornamental, but they not cozy or comfortable in the same way.
This being said, the title is accurate to the article but misleading. The subtitle is about "Striped Floors and Flickering LEDs". It isn't modern design, it's elements of modern design.
I'd suggest that the striped/patterned floors/LED points transcend styles, and would cause issues even in a more ornate/classical design. Style is individual, and I expect the diversities of brains and thinking patterns means that there is no right answer for what style is best for people.
The most interesting part of the article wasn't really reflective of style, it was visually crowded environments. They used the example of supermarkets, and that seems distinct from a visually rich style like the grandparent comment's home or Neo Gothic cathedrals. Being in a forest is visually crowded, too, but I'd expect it has the opposite effect the study measured. I think the fractal dimension of the detail, if they correlated it with the degree of distress, would be a factor.
Ornate and simple alternate back and forth in a reactionary preference cycle in history. We may be in a 'simple' phase but there is a nostalgic backlash happening with pre-digital aesthetics, and as evidenced here.
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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 Limitations section at the bottom certainly has a lot of limitations:
> This paper is a review, meaning it synthesizes and interprets existing research rather than presenting new experimental data. The authors themselves note that current visual tests for susceptibility to discomfort are subjective and poorly standardized. They also acknowledge that the proposed mechanism (that discomfort is the brain’s response to overwork) has not been fully tested, particularly the hypothesis that colored tints reduce discomfort by steering visual stimulation away from overactive brain areas. The relationship between the brain’s excitatory and inhibitory chemical signals and visual discomfort also remains, in their words, “unsettled.” Several key research questions are flagged as unresolved, including how to best quantify the real-world impact of visual stress on people’s lives and how to objectively measure susceptibility.
Flickering lights are about the only thing I saw in here that seem like they'd be a problem in the long term. Everything else your brain just adjusts to over time and stops noticing. Maybe the first few days in an office with bright colors would be slightly distracting, but after that you just stop seeing them. I would guess that a lot of the studies they reviewed probably tested people's reactions to these things when they saw them one time, not the hundredth time.
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."
> 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.
If the studies are of a person's initial exposure to these sorts of conditions, then that doesn't tell us anything about whether people adapt over time (and to be clear I have not read all the studies, but given the limitations listed I'm comfortable assuming they're not incredibly robust until someone tells me otherwise). I suspect the article's use of the word "adapt" is not the same as mine; from the context when they say the brain doesn't adapt they just mean that it shows a response at the time of the particular exposure they're measuring.
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).
Similarly, one my uni professors wrote a paper arguing that the opposite - standing in nature - results in healthy neural activity.
He showed people photos of geometric patterns (plain lines, basic shapes), natural patterns (fractals), and photos of nature itself (trees, animals, etc.) while reading their mental activity. The conclusion was that both fractals and nature photos cause significantly more efficient, diverse, and healthy-looking brain activity. Our brains inherently expect the world to look fractal-like, and in some ways even need it to look that way to form creative thoughts.
Completely lost the link to that article; it was a good read.
I don’t buy this. Feels like a non-problem or a very first world problem to even analyse and with the exception of lights, nothing else seemed plausible
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.
>Eyes and brain alike evolved over millennia to process natural scenes, forests, rivers, coastlines, open skies. These environments share a specific mathematical pattern: their visual complexity decreases predictably as you zoom in on finer and finer details.
Wut? It's precisely the opposite. Natural patterns have infinite complexity as you zoom in, and human-made patterns (most often) not.
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.
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.
I really hate shops, malls and supermarkets. I'm not easily overwhelmed and can handle being there fine. But it's just horrible there. Way too loud, bright and often too warm. Completely full of chaos and way too many useless products.
When I have to go I try to be out there as quickly as possible. I always thought that's weird, shouldn't those shops be designed in a way that makes me want to explore them, look at all the things they have, instead of just hunting down exactly what I need and leave as quickly as possible.
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 really hate lighting in modern offices. If there was one thing that folks actively worked to improve I would choose lighting. Having lights with a broader spectrum would go a long way in reducing eye strain and general fatigue, while likely allowing the lights to actually be brighter. Unfortunately I don't see this changing anytime soon.
But isn't that actually what modernism is about? I heard about Ornament and Crime in a university liberal arts class, and there really is this kind of problem. When you try to imitate natural forms, fractal structures are fundamentally difficult to mass produce, there are hygiene issues, and so the modernist approach became dominant. And as the saying goes, "form follows function", you cannot apply the artificial technologies that do not exist in nature the same way you would with old stone buildings.
In the same vein, contemporary art, like a Veronica, smashes form apart, and instead of concrete imitation of nature, it moves toward abstraction, geometry, and minimalism. But does not that come with a problem? It does not enter the brain directly the way natural forms do; you have to additionally recognize what it actually is. I do not think that is an incorrect observation.
Off topic but I really hate modern web design. I found the content of this article interesting but I could hardly read it scrolling through in-article ads, banners, etc. One of the reasons I like HN is the prevalence of personal blogs that just have text for me to sit and read.
> ... 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.
> I use reader mode on most sites where it is possible. ...
That's my go-to solution on mobile devices almost every single time because on small screens even a good adblocker simply isn't nearly enough to overcome the other issues you mention in your comment here.
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.
It's not just decor but architecture as well. Look I've been to Europe, I've seen the old architecture and decor there. It's unquestionably better. I get the feeling that modernity, at least in this day and age is about cost cutting and non-offensiveness more than anything else.
I‘ve definitely noticed this over time as spaces (especially public ones like cafes, retail locations, and restaurants) started being designed as props for Instagram/TikTok.
This made a big contribution because vertical short-form video feeds require extreme stimuli to get anyone’s attention - but they add nothing to the actual experience and often detract from it.
This has also led to the absolutely horrific acoustics where even in non-nightclub bars and normal restaurants, you have to yell to understand each other because the decor is made of tile, tables and chairs are at odd angles that increase distance, etc.
Everything now is subordinate to the visual environment because that’s what gets shared on Instagram.
Not saying interior design doesn’t matter, but its point should be to create a great overall experience, not to be visually stimulating at the expense of the rest.
The article doesn't touch much on why modern decor emerged as it did. It's a market response where everyone needs to (or feels the need to) pick up and move at a moment's notice. Companies are either expanding or like to think they'll be expanding soon. People move jobs so often that they have a hard time feeling settled where they are, so they design for that possibility. The modern aesthetic is one of planned impermanence.
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.
Ordinary folks when presented with an object have to perform a mental calculation over the cost/inconvenience of storage vs. disposal and if wanted again, replacement.
Cluttered old homes with lots of things all over the place make it a bit less jarring when there's a stack of work left out on a table.
Reminds me of the reason that grass yards exist: to show the world that one can afford land for the sake of owning it, rather than for growing crops.
The portion of rich people homes they actually use are often quite cluttered. The simile limitation of needing to walk to a room to use it means spreading out across a huge home gets annoying. Semi public spaces for guests on the other hand can look like hotels because that’s effectively what they are.
This being said, the title is accurate to the article but misleading. The subtitle is about "Striped Floors and Flickering LEDs". It isn't modern design, it's elements of modern design.
I'd suggest that the striped/patterned floors/LED points transcend styles, and would cause issues even in a more ornate/classical design. Style is individual, and I expect the diversities of brains and thinking patterns means that there is no right answer for what style is best for people.
The most interesting part of the article wasn't really reflective of style, it was visually crowded environments. They used the example of supermarkets, and that seems distinct from a visually rich style like the grandparent comment's home or Neo Gothic cathedrals. Being in a forest is visually crowded, too, but I'd expect it has the opposite effect the study measured. I think the fractal dimension of the detail, if they correlated it with the degree of distress, would be a factor.
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 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.
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.
> This paper is a review, meaning it synthesizes and interprets existing research rather than presenting new experimental data. The authors themselves note that current visual tests for susceptibility to discomfort are subjective and poorly standardized. They also acknowledge that the proposed mechanism (that discomfort is the brain’s response to overwork) has not been fully tested, particularly the hypothesis that colored tints reduce discomfort by steering visual stimulation away from overactive brain areas. The relationship between the brain’s excitatory and inhibitory chemical signals and visual discomfort also remains, in their words, “unsettled.” Several key research questions are flagged as unresolved, including how to best quantify the real-world impact of visual stress on people’s lives and how to objectively measure susceptibility.
Flickering lights are about the only thing I saw in here that seem like they'd be a problem in the long term. Everything else your brain just adjusts to over time and stops noticing. Maybe the first few days in an office with bright colors would be slightly distracting, but after that you just stop seeing them. I would guess that a lot of the studies they reviewed probably tested people's reactions to these things when they saw them one time, not the hundredth time.
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."
> 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.
If the studies are of a person's initial exposure to these sorts of conditions, then that doesn't tell us anything about whether people adapt over time (and to be clear I have not read all the studies, but given the limitations listed I'm comfortable assuming they're not incredibly robust until someone tells me otherwise). I suspect the article's use of the word "adapt" is not the same as mine; from the context when they say the brain doesn't adapt they just mean that it shows a response at the time of the particular exposure they're measuring.
Imagine someone claiming the opposite causes dementia, evidenced by reduced oxygen usage and lowered brain activity…
He showed people photos of geometric patterns (plain lines, basic shapes), natural patterns (fractals), and photos of nature itself (trees, animals, etc.) while reading their mental activity. The conclusion was that both fractals and nature photos cause significantly more efficient, diverse, and healthy-looking brain activity. Our brains inherently expect the world to look fractal-like, and in some ways even need it to look that way to form creative thoughts.
Completely lost the link to that article; it was a good read.
Those things are also just ugly.
Geometrical design (especially the ones with grids/vectors everywhere) are not minimalistic but tiring, really tiring.
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.
Wut? It's precisely the opposite. Natural patterns have infinite complexity as you zoom in, and human-made patterns (most often) not.
"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
When I have to go I try to be out there as quickly as possible. I always thought that's weird, shouldn't those shops be designed in a way that makes me want to explore them, look at all the things they have, instead of just hunting down exactly what I need and leave as quickly as possible.
I have the same reaction to it as you.
In the same vein, contemporary art, like a Veronica, smashes form apart, and instead of concrete imitation of nature, it moves toward abstraction, geometry, and minimalism. But does not that come with a problem? It does not enter the brain directly the way natural forms do; you have to additionally recognize what it actually is. I do not think that is an incorrect observation.
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.
That's my go-to solution on mobile devices almost every single time because on small screens even a good adblocker simply isn't nearly enough to overcome the other issues you mention in your comment here.
The paper itself is open access: https://www.mdpi.com/2411-5150/10/2/34
This made a big contribution because vertical short-form video feeds require extreme stimuli to get anyone’s attention - but they add nothing to the actual experience and often detract from it.
This has also led to the absolutely horrific acoustics where even in non-nightclub bars and normal restaurants, you have to yell to understand each other because the decor is made of tile, tables and chairs are at odd angles that increase distance, etc.
Everything now is subordinate to the visual environment because that’s what gets shared on Instagram.
Not saying interior design doesn’t matter, but its point should be to create a great overall experience, not to be visually stimulating at the expense of the rest.
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