How Pinterest Is Killing Our Aesthetics

Pinning and Manifesting

La la la la la! We go hunting for inspiration on Pinterest, the visual library. Casual strolling, or rather scrolling, usually leads us to intimate and serendipitous discoveries (aha!). These discoveries make us feel great about our fine taste. The behaviour exhibited here is much like flipping through a magazine. Except here, there is a constantly improving algorithm trying to pair you with your dream products while you are in a planning mode.

A wedding, a house, a party, a baby, a holiday.

A life.

These are very significant moments in our lives and we take inspiration from applications. Where the feeds are full of carefully curated and composed renditions of ‘experiences’. Experiences we are not having. It’s like our life is a film or an ad and we need production design and these platforms help us do exactly that.

We lose out on engaging with our experiences, stories and surroundings to come up with ideas and desires. We don’t use our intuition, senses, or our bodies that are present and constantly engaging in this environment to design our life HERE.

The whole point is to take design inspiration from life not from online to design life. That’s upside down. (An expression borrowed from a friend)

It’s an interesting phenomenon, lots to observe. Behaviour, market, relationships.

But it also leads us to a blunted sense of visuals that are neither local nor contextual.

We insert off minimalism anywhere, whenever in doubt.

I am guilty of many of these myself. It’s amazing how it seeps in. How fast the local tailors and manufacturers catch on. So spontaneous. And the results are also great to see, often turning into great jokes. The barber/parlour shop posters and names are a great example. Like a fascinating game of visual Chinese whispers.

Sorry I know it’s a very grim statement. When we were younger, there was still a way of putting together celebrations. We would have our mothers bake and cook elaborately for parties. All the raw materials had to be bought, cooked, prepared, laid out and so on.

Now we outsource the whole party. The cake, the food, music, plates, fragrances, conversation the entire experience.

It changes the way we socialise.

Over the years I have noticed it’s a chore for people to party even. When did that happen? It’s an obligation for the party to be thrown and attended. Strange no?

I don’t know where I am going with this. But doesn't it have something to do with losing the plot? Why do we get together? The motivations of celebrations are not clear. It’s overridden by visuals that are shown to us. That becomes the driving force rather than the togetherness.

Our living rooms only look wrong. It’s not well designed for long chats. At least not the Pinterest living rooms.

Brands and pinned up boards now have effectively trained us in a way that emotionally motivates us to desire a certain narrow way of imagining our lives. Geography does not exist, rather it’s online. All these spaces are being designed with the same inspiration boards. When you travel, it doesn’t matter where you are, the cafes, the bathrooms look and smell the same. These kinds of platforms have homogenised groups of people’s aesthetic sensibilities to a scary level. There is a visual framework where everything must fit in. So none of us bothers to engage with our personal life to reveal anything. There are lesser discoveries. We all have the same syllabus. Our brains are becoming tiny. Imagination has gone to sleep.

We inject everything with so much borrowed details that there is not much room for products or experiences to surprise us.

I was working as a textile designer in the beginning of the last decade. It fascinates me to see how things have changed. What aesthetic means. Everyone’s house and interior look the same. It doesn’t even look lived in. There is hardly anything external dictating how you organise your spaces. Everyone has a reference link. We can’t articulate our desires without one.

How realistic are minimalism and Marie kondo for most of the average citizens of India?

What do you mean it doesn’t spark joy? Yeh kya hai? The idea of cleanliness is bungled with minimalism. Have you seen the way our (Indian) outdoors are.

How do we practice listening through the eyes? I think that could be a way to unlearn. A good way could be to draw and doodle. You don’t have to be an artist type to doodle. It would force us to see things slowly. And that’s when you will really start questioning, Who the hell decided to change our terracotta planters to cement? Why are we buying things that look recycled and are clearly anything but that? Maybe before making or buying something we could ask ourselves quickly, what % of us is really in it?

Aesthetics is a very subjective term. Apparently derived from the Greek aesthesis, meaning “sensation” or “feeling.”

How do we get to that when the intention is always to get a photographable frame?

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