How algorithms are making our environments bland
The Pantone color of the year for 2026 is white. It's called Cloud Dancer, which is described as a "lofty white." This choice reflects a growing trend away from color in our visual world.
You might have noticed this yourself. Where an area once had a distinct sense of place, we are seeing more cookie-cutter developments popping up. Take the London borough of Elephant and Castle, which has seen billions of pounds of development in recent years. The area has gone from a Latin American enclave full of distinct and varied buildings to what Oli Mould, a professor of social, cultural and historical geography, has warned is an "identikit homogeneous gentrified place" that risks "destroying the very thing that makes a community thriving and beautiful in the first place."
There is a similar increasing sense of uniformity and sameness in urban design around the world. In 1993, architect Rem Koolhaas traveled 360,000 km (224,000 miles) around the world, observing the rationalization of urban design (the movement toward efficiency rather than creativity in the process) through what he termed the "generic city." Functional, efficient but colorless.
Algorithms of taste
This trajectory toward blandness is reinforced and sustained by the increasing tendency to allow algorithms to mediate the choices we make. This has the effect of training perspectives to converge in "a strong pull toward sameness."
Algorithms make predictions based on our choices, from music to home furnishings. The algorithm takes that choice and suggests similar products based on it, ultimately reinforcing and producing a monotonous and generic aesthetic taste. For instance, if you like a pop song by Sabrina Carpenter, you will then be served many songs exactly like it until your Spotify Wrapped says you are among the top listeners of something Spotify has bafflingly called "Pink Pilates Princess Strut Pop."
These sorts of algorithms, in turn, reinforce the production of products to meet those generic tastes, ultimately flattening the diversity of creative work in everything from the songs we listen to to the urban surroundings in which we live.
Algorithmically driven taste results in a monoculture where art, pets and everything in between are chosen to match the generic palette of an algorithmic world.
This generic algorithmic taste is also having an impact at the design stage, particularly where metrics and investment desires overwhelm other considerations. Environments are increasingly considered by key decision-makers such as developers not in terms of their contribution to lived experience and cultural life, but as investment objects or financial assets, readily translated and transacted. The result is a flattening not only of our visual environment but also of our engagement with that environment. This loss is significant for our social well-being.
Back in 1983, American sociologist George Ritzer introduced the concept of the "McDonaldization" of society to explain the business rationalization of moving the design process toward faster, easier-to-manage, cheaper and more predictable outcomes. Like a McDonald's burger, the production process becomes standardized. The burger is the same no matter where in the world you have one. Ritzer described this in environments ranging from restaurants to hospitals.
Ritzer acknowledged some of the advantages, such as cost savings and customers knowing what to expect. However, the main problem he identified with this streamlining is that there is no space for experimentation or personality because creativity and design are organized around efficiency. In this control of process, we paradoxically lose control because we lose choice and creativity...
Source: Phys.org
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