When each day is the same When each day is the same as the next, it's because people fail to recognize the good things that happen in their lives every day that the sun rises. Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist goodnessmonotony
The greatest flaw in city zoning Raskin, in his essay on variety, suggested that the greatest flaw in city zoning is that it permits monotony. I think this is correct. Perhaps the next greatest flaw is that it ignores scale of use, where this is an important consideration, or confuses it with kind of use. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities zoningmonotonyscale
The vanishing designer An Article by Chuánqí Sun uxdesign.cc Visionary designers have lost their conceptual integrity to an industrial complex optimized for consensus, predictability, and short-term business gain. The rise of customer-obsession mantra and data-driven culture cultivated a generation of designers who only take risk-free and success-guaranteed steps towards the inevitable local maxima of design monotony. The same, the same, the sameDesign as an engineering problemThe heat death of designDesign with courage uxmonotonycraft
Both practical and aesthetic concerns The group [of Irwin, Howard, and Wortz]'s thinking here seems to have been influenced to a degree by Christopher Alexander's landmark article, "A City is Not a Tree" (1965)... Irwin referred specifically to Alexander's argument in his effort to sort out his own thinking about how the Miami International Airport might be designed with both practical and aesthetic concerns in mind, allowing for their overlap and emergence from the conditions on the ground. Matthew Simms, Robert Irwin: A Conditional Art A City Is Not a Tree