seeking the outside |a new perspective

It's nothing new that day by day contemporary design outputs look more alike. There is a considerable amount of sameness, but the problematic part is so little questioning of why. The designer is offered countless possibilities thanks to the developing technology and is expected to produce experimental works. On the contrary, we are in a period full of designs that will soon be impossible to distinguish one from the other. Besides the visual exhaustion, this absence of an experimental design process causes less expressive creation but more blindly copying. It seems like the limits of technology expand, the limits of our imagination shrink.

One of the main reasons behind this monopoly is the aesthetic monoculture launched by the trendsetters like Apple, Facebook, and Google. In one of her interviews, Amy Standen states “There are consequences, both social and aesthetic, of a web that’s increasingly dominated by big corporations trying to sell us stuff. Aesthetically, it means less individualism, more of whatever the current visual trend maybe.” It is understandable that sometimes people tend to use a tested way of the solution instead of taking risks.

Besides implementing tested methods in new projects, another reason for this sameness is the ease of contemporary content management systems like WordPress, Drupal, Blogspot. Developing technology is to provide a user-friendly way of creating and editing websites, but in a limited potential called templates. Unfortunately, the problem is templates are content-agnostic. (Müller, 2021) It ignores the connection between the content and the visualization which is the core of design thinking. However, the huge majority of contemporary designers are neither able to step out of their comfort zone and try new things because of time-saving templates nor do they bother themselves by overthinking a project.

It is obvious that this aesthetic monoculture is an extension of consumption culture. The big companies, as trendsetters and authority of contemporary design, lead others to follow the path and stay in the box. It is worth researching this relation between contemporary design and the consumption culture.