An essay on the quiet disappearance of cultural design and the “race to the bottom” Introduction: When products still told stories # There was a time when you could tell where a product came from just by looking at it. Italian cars were beautiful, eccentric, often unreliable, but full of charm. Japanese cameras were minimalist, pragmatic, precise. German kitchen appliances were heavy, robust, and functional. Products were ambassadors of origin and attitude. They bore a signature, a cultural semantics, sometimes even an ethic. A toaster could be “German.” A radio could seem Italian. A camera from Japan not only had functions, but also an implicit value proposition.
About honest materials, imitations, and the silent longing for authenticity # The aesthetics of Severance and what it triggers in me # The series Severance on Apple TV+ not only tells a dystopian story about the divided self—it also depicts a world that deeply moves me aesthetically. Clean lines, coordinated shades of green, wood paneling, simple textures: all of this creates an atmosphere of order and tranquility, but also alienation. It is an artificial world—and that is precisely what makes it so fascinating.
I’ve been spending a lot of my spare time continuing to hone my artistic drawing skills with Drawabox. I’ve almost completed lesson two, and here’s my results thus far:
Thinking in 3D # The task here was to draw arrows and forms that appear to exist in a 3D space on a 2D surface.
Texture and Detail # This one was a lot of fun but also surprisingly difficult. It consists of studying textures, their depth model and its application on a 3D surface under a fixed light condition.
I’ve been giving learning how to draw an earnest new attempt. Currently, I’m on box 210 of 250 boxes of the drawabox 250 box challenge.
It’s mind-numbingly hard sometimes to push through. Someone compared it to “artistic push-ups”. And that’s what it feels like. I’ve been doing this for over a month now, about 5–10 boxes a day. But I like to think I’ve already come a long way!
