Global Interior Design

My wife Lipi sends this one: Normal Room is social media/design culture taken to its breaking point. The premise of the site is this: upload pictures of your house to share it with a global audience.

That's it.

What results is, as Lipi describes, strangely fascinating. What I find interesting is that people make no attempts what-so-ever to clean or organize the rooms they are showing and a meta-reading of the whole experience of viewing several hundred pictures of various rooms in homes all over the world is that we, as citizens of that giant condominium we call planet Earth, pretty much all have really bad taste.

There are, of course, some anthropological investigations begging to be done. How, for instance, does the Irish family squeeze into that teeny bathroom, get the door closed, pull down their pants, and successfully navigate to the toilet without falling into the shower? Or what is wrong with the Brazilian kids? Why is their bedroom so frighteningly clean?

Billed as an inspirational interior design resource, Normal Rooms does little to inspire thoughts about design but instead is the internet equivalent of driving through the neighborhood on a winter's evening and peering the windows of your neighbors' homes.

If some of the web 2.0 has been about getting the average person to share their creative enterprises with an international crowd of like-minded people then I think it is important to note that what seems to matter to most is not cutting-edge aesthetics or the latest design fashion. It is, instead, comfort and the grind of everyday life.

And piles of books and magazines, apparently.