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
The works of God Via reddit Thus the first and most important stratagem adopted to cheapen construction was the squaring and turning of components in order to eliminate offering up and individual fitting. The flatness, straightness, and squareness which more than any other characteristic distinguish man's construction from the works of God, derive from economy. We see the mark of economy in every building of squared masonry however magnificent it may be. Only the few remnants of ancient polygonal masonry remind us that the pattern of stone work where each stone is individually fitted can be very different from the cheap squared pattern to which we are accustomed." David Pye, The Nature and Aesthetics of Design The versatility of flat surfacesUseless work on useful things