The Predicament of the White Bedroom — How Immoral Design is Shaping Our Future
This article is by Anna Schmitz. Anna is a Junior studying Human-Centered Design and Engineering at the University of Washington.
Everyone loves that coffee shop. It’s a short drive away, nestled in an eclectic neighborhood, and its visitors arrive with trendy glasses and beanies, eager to get to the grind on tech work. You already know of this place. In thousands of neighborhoods, the minimalistic hipster coffee joint is becoming a staple to young techies and entrepreneurs. And as a young person yourself, you like this place. You know you do. The atmosphere is refreshing, the coffee is strong, the music has a nice ambience, and natural light is everywhere. But… something is missing.
If you haven’t been to a place like this, you’ve seen it on social media. Young people take candid photos of one another against textured white walls in minimalistic spaces. The images promote clearness and a little bit of mystery, as no one can ever be sure what exactly those abstract white walls mean. The trend not only invades the traditional warmth and closeness that coffee shops have historically been known for, but is seeping its way into workplaces, and especially the home.
Designing for minimalism, like in so many modern spaces and products, may be the worst thing yet that we can do to the livelihood of our fellow human beings. And it’s already appearing. Your modern coffee shop is one of them.
Minimalism, in itself, is neither right nor wrong. It is a purposefully blank canvas, untethered, begging a user to indulge and explore their creativity. It is innately neutral. This aspect is captivating to the human attention — there is simply no more curious way to explore our minds and beliefs like simple spaces, interactions, and designs.
In itself, design is a maze of debate between “right” and “wrong”. It is an emotional, subjective practice, where answers are never final and products are never perfect. Evaluating design in binary terms is often ill-fitting. However, humans are innately stubborn creatures, and our morals won’t rationally sway between “right” and “wrong”. As compassionate beings, we steadfastly clamp onto our individual definitions of “right” and “wrong” to guide us. Some things may be “just wrong”, no questions asked. Designers aren’t immune to this.
As designers, we are trained to expertly manipulate moral gray area. But no matter how practiced a designer may be, everyone has a tipping point. At what point does the complexity of an entire experience, beyond is surface-level design, make itself false? When do you, as the designer, walk away from an idea for reasons design can’t explain?
Thus, begins the predicament of the minimalistic white home: a trend, an artistic statement, and an infamous moral gray area that may damage us more than we can predict today.
A colleague once proudly showed me an image of a white bedroom. Two of the walls were solid white, with the third being completely glass and bursting with natural light. A pristine white bed stood in one corner, protruding from the wall like a wave. Beside the bed was a nightstand of a solid white cube. The wardrobe looked identical. On the nearest white wall, you can glimpse a massive UI built into the wall, displaying a few statistics on weather, a calendar, and perhaps a reminder or two. My colleague’s prized design prototype was rendered in the opposite corner of the room, looking like a square white appliance, patiently blinking its LED eye. Otherwise, this room was empty. One woman stood alone in the center. It’s minimalism at its grandest.
I’ll start with the fact that this is a pure white room. As the room is, many of us would love to walk around inside. A good fifteen minutes inside may help to recollect on a thought or two. Uncluttered environments tend to help the mind settle itself and overstimulation can do more harm than good. However, let’s discuss the fact that the white room was a bedroom.
“Hello? Is anyone there?” That was his response to what I asked would be the first thing he’d do after walking inside. Not coincidentally, that’s exactly what I would do too. I would look for any possible signs that I wasn’t alone. The fact of the matter is, if you were the woman in the white bedroom image you really would be alone and no one else would be coming. All of the digital panels on the far wall displayed information about that woman and no one else.
Let that sink in. You’re that woman. You’re alone in a white bedroom. Does that remind you of anything? Think about moving to a new city, trying to meet people and form relationships, returning to a bedroom that is very much like the bedroom in the image, where you might talk to yourself out loud and no one would answer. Modern, isn’t it? Many young people have been there. Perhaps seeing loneliness in this light is horrifying, but it’s already a reality for many of us today. It’s nothing new, just in a more malignant form. And yet… designers are still attracted to it.
A bedroom is a place of comfort and salvation, and it returns you to center at the end of the day. Perhaps white and lack of visual detail helps clear the mind, but this white bedroom is not stopping you from sitting on redundant thoughts or negative energy. That’s in the nature of neutrality. A man is the master of his own mind, some percentage of the time, but not always. Whoever you are, wandering forever through your own head without a soul nor external imperfection to ground you can be torturous.
Pop culture loves to play with this “stark” form of minimalism — secretive offices, labs, villains’ lairs, anything of that nature make this whole idea much more mysterious and thrilling to someone who hasn’t experienced it. In reality, those spaces are cells and isolation chambers. This is what people do to each other as punishment — place someone in a room, alone, with nothing but four white walls and the person’s own thoughts. No one gets better from long entrapment in that type of environment. Universally, the mind will try to entertain itself until it starts to characterize another voice to give itself some company, eventually hallucinating to fill in the gaps. Nothing about long exposure to that type of environment is healthy. Sensory deprivation chambers have seen this same thing occur to people inside for too long.
Naturally, a person wouldn’t spend their entire existence in just a bedroom. However, imagine the state of the rest of the house, following a similar pristine white theme. Then think about the vehicles the house owns — do you think they’re going to be any different? If this trend becomes socially acceptable in the future, which my colleague suggested through his image and prototype, imagine workplaces and businesses following suit. Especially with the state of the environment and people’s increasing dependence on servant-like objects and pristine rooms, can we expect anyone in the future to willingly step outside of that? There may be few people in the future who willingly move between the two. Especially if drought continues to ensue in major areas of the country, don’t imagine we’re going to get any better by building pristine Carbon-expensive homes and businesses to band-aid the issue. At that point, it’s almost meaningless to live in a certain city, as they may all look and behave the same.
Think about the house as a home. Anything and everything can happen inside a home. A person could have friends over, have movie nights, have cooking and children and hobbies and dancing and music and anything else. That’s what homes are made for. Are we doing the nature of being in a home any favors to take that away and substitute it with minimalism? These events are what people look forward to at the end of the workday or when they retire — making messes with grandchildren, revisiting old furniture and photographs and architecture that still do have soul within them, all because those odd and unexpected experiences tell a story that words can’t explain.
For those reasons, minimalism in this degree has a major but unexpected moral problem.
Even so, that’s not the most astonishing aspect of this whole idea. From other colleagues and friends of whom I introduced to this concept, most smiled and nodded at the image of the minimalistic white bedroom. They were comfortable with the idea, and may have even liked it. After reviewing the image, one friend made an absurdly impactful comment: “and that’s the future”.
That comment in itself didn’t matter to me — what truly put a knife in my chest was the fact that she was right.
At the rate at which first-world experiences are simplifying and behaving more and more like the white bedroom, can anyone argue that this isn’t the future? Trends are predictable and easy for consumerism to follow. The trend of flat-faced, non-tactile modern design is becoming less of a nice-to-have and more of a necessity.
As a sweeping movement, how do we argue that imperfections, richness in the senses and genuine connection to other people, are salient to not only how your body and mind cooperate to form your presence in the world but to life?
How do we enforce resilience, courage, kindness, and patience in a lifestyle buried so far in abstraction that nearly no one will mentally use “white spaces” for deep reflection and thought, as they’re intended? In our 21st century digital age, we’ve all seen what short attention spans are doing to our capacity for empathy and happiness. Further simplification and minimalism may not be our best way out.
No one thing can teach us how to genuinely to be better people — that comes from unexpected events, getting in uncomfortable environments, being face-to-face, products or places that don’t work right, all of the very natural ups and downs that really do show us how to grow. Ironing those out for pristine and abstract flows is no way to live. Humans are built positive, strong, adaptable, and more than capable of getting there with the right resistance, without any emotional sacrifice along the way. In the prison scenario, people who need help don’t get better from living in white-room isolation. And as designers, we must have the empathy to help the users of our products who need help most.
This isn’t to say we need to ignore usability and emotional accuracy — this is precisely why we need design to own up to this challenge. Manipulating them for a better quality of life is our entire mission. So, it also isn’t correct to say we need to let friction exist, because even though users become stronger as they deal with it, friction doesn’t affect everyone in the same way. We ultimately want to bring positivity and health and delight to people’s lives. However, people can still get there with the right degree of friction, again referring to how uniquely adaptable each of us inherently are and were built to be. Yes, we need to be mindful that we don’t introduce unnecessary or truly harmful pain points, but instead enhance the emotional experience with strategic resistance.
Any type of design — whether UI, architecture, UX, industrial design, or any other — can’t completely steer this snowball effect. As future contributors to the design industry, we’re limited to only what our respective companies are capable of, and frankly what will generate the most revenue. My friend was dead-right when she said “and that’s the future.” My colleague who generated the image and prototype wasn’t inherently being immoral or “wrong” — he was simply following orders. It’s his job to help the company and that’s exactly what they wanted to hear. The evidence is all there.
But let’s focus on the bigger picture: When are we going to stop following orders and start steering what the design industry is set on track to create?
What future do you really want?
Are you going to design in support of the minimalistic white bedroom?
Anyone could very realistically end up in that exact room fifteen years in the future, still asking “Hello? Is anyone there?” and still neither the personality of the room nor another human provides them with a response. A sleek white device could be sitting in the corner, stark white and emotionless, blinking an LED eye back at you. Is that truly successful design? Whatever trends or experiences either of us develop today we will have to live with. Even if I’m completely wrong about all of this, which I am more than willing to be, why are we not talking about it?
Once again, imagine yourself in that modern hipster coffee shop. The one with the white brick walls, trendy lighting, and soft mumble music in the background. Picture yourself cozied up to a laptop, alike every other techie in the room, your nose buried in email or code or prototypes. Let’s face it: you’re not that far away from being the woman in the white bedroom. That interface — your laptop — was meant for you and only you. No one speaks to you. The room and scattering of other people behave as neutrally as the bedroom’s white walls. You’re a young creative, a modern innovator, yet your environment reflects none of that. Worst of all — you like it. This is the modern world you’ve come to know and it’s difficult to see through the haze of minimalism, to a sensory-rich and joyful world where creatives can live up to their fullest.
It’s our responsibility as the next workforce to match human capability and happiness together. Minimalism isn’t the only way. There’s something more immersive, slower, and more delightful out there. We just have to bring it to life.
