In 2017, the New York Times Style Magazine ran a piece on Harry Nuriev – and his design firm Crosby Studios – titled: The man designing spaces for the Instagram age. 

Since then, Harry and his firm have been in Time Magazine, have had a solo show at Design Miami, and have been named to the Architectural Digest 100, among many other things.

There has obviously been a lot of talk over the last few years about the impact that Instagram is having on physical spaces and design #IRL (in real life). 

Some, or perhaps many, worry that it is having a “homogenizing effect on design.” Everyone is following a kind of global minimalism that looks good on social, but is maybe getting a bit monotonous. 

There’s no question that online is having an impact on how we design offline. But I am far less fussed about it than most. 

Architecture, design, and art have always reflected the cultural milieu at the time, and it just so happens that we are living through a period where the internet is transforming so much of what we know.

It is always important to question what is going on. But I think Crosby Studios is doing some really great work.

The product matters. How big is the screen on this smartphone? How many horses does this all-wheel drive car have? And how high are the ceilings in this condo? (Some architects get grumpy with me when I call buildings a “product.” It’s so much more than that, right?)

But here is a good reminder from Zander Nethercutt via a post he did on Medium earlier this year: People Don’t Buy Products, They Buy Better Versions of Themselves.

The example he gives is that of Pepsi. While damn near identical to Coke in terms of its chemical composition, Pepsi was struggling until it decided to try something new. They stopped focusing on the product itself and instead starting selling the type of person you would become, if you drank Pepsi.

These people, and this campaign, became known as the Pepsi Generation.

We have talked about this idea before on the blog and this approach to selling is now quite commonplace. But I like how Nethercutt distills it down: Desire translates into consumption. And I want to buy a better version of myself.

I also buy his add-on argument that social media has amplified our awareness and desires around self, because today we are so often externalizing it to the world and being instantaneously judged on it. Like. No like.

Am I the kind of person who eats here, stays there, and consumes this?

Photo by Christina Boemio on Unsplash

Earlier this week I deleted my Facebook account. If we were friends on the service and you can no longer find me, this is the reason why. 

Part of why I did this certainly had to do with privacy. I read Brian Acton’s (WhatsApp cofounder) account in Forbes this week. And I have been following many of the discussions over the past year:

Privacy legislation is perhaps the only thing that could pose an existential threat to a business that’s entirely powered by watching and recording what people do at vast scale. And relying on that scale (and its own dark pattern design) to manipulate consent flows to acquire the private data it needs to profit. -Natasha Lomas

But at the same time, I’m still on and use Instagram and WhatsApp (both Facebook companies), and I use Twitter pretty much every day.

So I am certainly not in a position to be smug about this decision. Hopefully this post does not come across that way.

The simple truth is that I had more or less stopped using the service. I had long ago turned off mobile notifications and so it had become more of a hassle than anything else.

Every now and then I would go on and find notifications and messages that I wasn’t responding to. 

So it had finally reached a point where I thought to myself: Why keep my data here (by the way, you can download all of your data from the site) and why check it sporadically if I’m not really deriving any value out of it? Simplify.

I enjoy Instagram because taking photos is one of my primary passions outside of real estate and design. And I enjoy Twitter as a source of news and mostly civil conversation. 

I am easy to get ahold of. I don’t need Facebook for that. Any of the social links at the top of this page (if you’re reading this post on the web), will get you there.