The reason why many older people do not follow fashion isn't because they don't understand it, but because they have seen it all before. This is also the reason why there is a tendency to get grumpier with age. The first time round fashions can have a certain novelty and, occasionally, something new does come along. People who now stick to a particular style have probably followed fashion at some time in their past. But a lot of fashion is just change for change's (or commercial gain's) sake, and that can get wearing, very wearing. Resisting fashion can become a heroic fight as retailers are completely in its thrall and you can find that things simply become unavailable. A couple of years ago there was a fashion for purple clothing. It became quite amusing looking at shop window displays in Italy and seeing nothing but a sea of purple in all its shades. Anyone who didn't like purple would, presumably, have to wait till the next fashion bus came along.
Fashion, of course, makes itself felt in all areas of life. Clothing is the first thing that comes to mind when the word is mentioned but it also shapes the environment in which we live, infecting everything from the way food is presented to the shape of waste bins. Architecture is at the whim of fashion but, unfortunately for architects, any mistakes tend to linger and mean that buildings can become dated very quickly. Consequently architects will reign in some of their more extreme reactions to fashion in fear of leaving an embarrassing edifice to haunt them.
Not so software designers.
Microsoft have turned their back on anything that suggests three dimensions in their Windows 8 operating system and 'flattened' everything out into simple areas of colour. They call them 'tiles' and the whole idea of reducing everything in a GUI to its most simple and impenetrable form has met with some resistance. So you would think that other software companies would take note and steer another course. Actually, no you wouldn't, because if you are old enough to have seen it all before you know that the headlong rush into a particular design dead-end is unstoppable. Google are currently following the path to minimalism. I have mentioned this before but Google keep reminding me so I can't resist protesting again. Their latest roll-out of their search page has banished the menu bar. This now means that operations that used to be carried out with one button click now require two. This could, of course, be because Amazon have patented 'one-click' but it is more likely that useful things clutter up their nice minimal work space and need to be banished. Preferably somewhere difficult to find.
My wife has an Android phone and it has just updated itself. Mine has yet to receive the command from above but it will, doubtless, appear any day now. Without asking anyone if they want the interface with their most commonly accessed piece of technology messed around with they have now flattened everything. No choice is given, you are supposed now to be eager for a 'new look' and thankful that they have decided for you what it is going to be. Resistance is futile. They have also chosen to move some of the furniture around and their end users will just have to put up with banging into things for a while, for the sake of fashion.
If fashion went in a straight line introducing us to new and exciting things along the path to some sort of design Nirvana it wouldn't be so bad. But the reality is that the next wave of 'bright young things' will be along in a while and everything will rush headlong in another direction, probably backwards. The current BYT's will presumably recognize this as a 'retrograde' step and join the ranks of the grumpy.
In days gone by we had to put up with all of this because the infrastructure wasn't there to allow people to find and adopt their own style. Things are different now. Software can be designed to allow everyone complete control over the look and feel of things. By allowing 'user preferences' they can allow their customer base to locate their own comfort zone and opt to stay there. The computer modelling software that I have used for the last nearly twenty years allowed this. Each time they released a new version you could opt to stick with the old interface and not have to go through a new learning curve. Microsoft bought that company and then pulled the plug on it a few months later so it is permanently in stasis now. It won't develop as new technology comes along but then again I won't be bothered by BYTs gaining control either. On balance that is probably a good thing, and you never know it may become a design classic.
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