When I first started studying industrial design, I fell in love with minimalism.

I admired Dieter Rams. I admired Jony Ive. The idea of removing everything unnecessary felt almost philosophical. Every line had a purpose. Every button had to justify its existence. Good design wasn't about adding more—it was about knowing what to leave out.

For their time, they changed design forever.

But somewhere along the way, minimalism stopped being one design philosophy among many. It became the default.

Now I can't stop noticing it.

Phones. Furniture. Home appliances. Packaging. Logos. Architecture. Websites. Interfaces. Everywhere I look, products seem to be converging towards the same visual language. Details are disappearing. Everything is becoming quieter, flatter and more anonymous.

Minimalism didn't just influence products. It became the language every product speaks.

Ironically, the one place where I still see designers embracing complexity is automotive design. Cars still celebrate surfaces, lighting signatures, proportions and details that give them identity. In almost every other field, I feel like character is slowly being designed away.

I don't think designers suddenly became less creative. I think the world around design changed.

The factory has quietly become one of the strongest designers of our time.

Today's products are shaped as much by manufacturing, logistics and economics as they are by designers. Every unique part costs money. Every assembly step adds time. Every custom component needs tooling. Products need to be manufactured quickly, packed efficiently, shipped globally and sold at increasingly competitive prices.

None of these decisions are wrong. In fact, each one makes perfect sense.

But when every company optimizes for the same constraints, products slowly begin to resemble one another.

The product isn't only designed for the user anymore. It's designed for the entire manufacturing ecosystem.

Whenever I think about this, my mind goes back to the Sony Walkman era.

Every Walkman had character.

Not because Sony was trying to be artistic, but because the hardware demanded it.

The shell wasn't designed first. It evolved from what was happening inside.

A Walkman wasn't just a box around electronics. It was a physical expression of everything happening beneath its surface. There were play buttons, rewind buttons, fast-forward buttons, Dolby switches, Mega Bass controls, cassette doors, battery compartments and intricate mechanical assemblies. Every function needed its own physical interface. Every engineering decision left a mark on the outside.

That's something I relate to personally.

I'm honestly not very good at designing expressive outer shells first. Most of the time, I begin with the internal components. The PCB. The battery. The motors. The fasteners. The cooling. The mechanisms. I arrange everything that has to exist, and only then does the enclosure begin to emerge.

I don't design the shell first. I discover it.

Sometimes I wonder if that's exactly what happened with many products from the 1980s and 1990s.

Those products weren't trying to hide their complexity. They were honest about it. The outer body became an extension of the engineering because the engineering itself was complex. The form naturally grew around what was happening inside.

Today, the opposite often feels true.

The engineering became invisible, so the shell became the product.

Modern electronics contain far more sophisticated technology than a Walkman ever did. Faster processors. Better batteries. Tiny sensors. Wireless radios. Cameras powered by incredible image processing.

Yet almost all of that complexity is hidden.

Software has replaced physical controls. Components have become smaller. Manufacturing has become more efficient. As the inside disappeared from view, designers were left shaping the outside.

That's where I feel we've started using too much language that doesn't really matter.

We spend hours talking about emotion, storytelling and design language, when sometimes the best form simply emerges from the engineering.

I don't think products need more decoration.

I don't think we should abandon minimalism either. It solved real problems, and I still deeply admire the people who pioneered it. They questioned the conventions of their time.

But perhaps we've inherited their ideas so completely that we've stopped questioning them ourselves.

Maybe the convention worth challenging today isn't ornament.

Maybe it's minimalism.

The products I remember most weren't memorable because they were loud. They were memorable because they had character. They showed me how they worked. Their personalities came from the engineering inside them, not from a story someone wrote after the product was finished.

Perhaps that's what I miss the most.

Character isn't something we add to the outside.

Sometimes it's simply what appears when the inside has something worth expressing.