Report: The Diminishing Marginal Value of Aesthetics

Usually disruptions create new markets, which generate enormous wealth and value. In the case of aesthetics, much of this value has been soaked up by the existing infrastructure providers: PC manufacturers (hardware), Adobe, (software), advertising networks and aggregators (distribution). We do see vast growth in the number of boutique agencies, de... See more

Slightly controversial aesthetics cater to the leading edge of consumer culture, a large population willing to spend money in order to maintain its status. As this group consumes, the cultural Overton window shifts to accommodate more and more radical aesthetics, which lose their novel status as they become normalized. The cultural normalcy spectru... See more

Graphic design, the discipline of aesthetic production, is facing a crisis as it reconciles with catastrophic effects of network technology on its profitability. Even prolific designers who produce work with a characteristic original aesthetic are quickly copied. As their work is pillaged and reproduced downstream (leftstream), it becomes increasin... See more

To broaden our view: we must look at image production (and cultural production in general) not just as a specific vocation, but as a novel consumer behavior. The popular Technology Adoption Life Cycle framework proposes that different psychographic consumer segments—early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggard markets—can be penetrate... See more

David Rudnick on his creative strategies and insistence on original work: "My struggle is not to maintain authorship. I think authorship's presence is paradoxical in design. Design to me is a synthesis of the message that must be shaped and the audience that must receive it. If one starts with an analysis of both message and audience, then authorsh... See more

We should look for opportunities for true disruption in aesthetics by asking the following questions:

• Where are avant-garde artists (early adopters) making new aesthetic movements happen, and what tools are they using? Turning to the far right side of the cultural normalcy spectrum may be useful.


• What emerging technologies could be used for cultural

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The internet has enabled a truly distributed and multidirectional network, in which any node can be a content creator, broadcaster, and consumer. Any two nodes can have a 1:1 relationship; as a whole, the model can be described as many-to-many (M2M). However, despite the possibility of 1:1 relationships between producer-broadcasters and their audie... See more