The anti-minimalist backlash is the bigger story behind Oxygen’s revival
The anti-minimalist backlash is the bigger story behind Oxygen’s revival
反极简主义浪潮：Oxygen 复兴背后的深层故事
Image by: Nuno Pinheiro 图片来源：Nuno Pinheiro
Following posts on specific work being done on Oxygen, this post is going to try to go beyond the manifest work and look at the bigger picture driving it. The motivation for writing it came when I was listening to a music artist who had completely rebranded himself by appending “Frutiger” to his name. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. It dawned on me right there and then that I had been seeing a lot of this very phenomenon lately. 继之前关于 Oxygen 项目具体工作的文章之后，本文将尝试跳出具体工作本身，探讨推动这一现象背后的宏观图景。写这篇文章的动机源于我当时正在听一位音乐人的作品，他通过在名字后加上“Frutiger”彻底重塑了自己的品牌形象。这成了压垮骆驼的最后一根稻草。那一刻我突然意识到，最近我一直在目睹这种现象。
The easiest descriptor for it would be nostalgia. But I would claim there’s a lot more to it than that. We don’t need to look much farther than the KDE world for examples. The most prominent one is probably the valiant effort called aeroshell. It’s arguably even more telling than redefining your whole music brand around Frutiger Aero nostalgia, since it means people are actually maintaining forks of core KDE Plasma components just to make the desktop look like Windows 7. 最简单的描述就是“怀旧”。但我认为，这背后的含义远不止于此。我们无需远求，在 KDE 的世界里就有现成的例子。最显著的可能就是名为“aeroshell”的英勇尝试。这甚至比围绕“Frutiger Aero”怀旧风重塑整个音乐品牌更具说明意义，因为它意味着人们为了让桌面看起来像 Windows 7，竟然在维护 KDE Plasma 核心组件的分支版本。
And then of course there is our own Oxygen restoration project, polishing a KDE theme of the past into something presentable in the present. Browsing social media, I also can’t help but notice a certainly not small amount of retro-yearning posts. Those restoration efforts, those posts, and the outpour of positive messages surrounding the Oxygen restoration (which was honestly much stronger than we expected) tell an important story. Not just about design preferences, but about unmet needs. 当然，还有我们自己的 Oxygen 修复项目，旨在将过去的一款 KDE 主题打磨成符合当下审美、可用的作品。浏览社交媒体时，我不禁注意到大量对复古风格的渴望。这些修复工作、那些帖子，以及围绕 Oxygen 修复项目涌现出的积极反馈（坦率地说，其热度远超我们的预期），都在讲述一个重要的故事：这不仅仅关乎设计偏好，更关乎那些未被满足的需求。
The easy reading is nostalgia: people miss what they grew up with, and that’s that. But I don’t think sentiment alone explains the scale and persistence of what we’re seeing. To understand it better, it helps to look at a parallel that might seem distant at first: architecture. “The less is bore” statement did not emerge in graphic design. It emerged from architectural criticism, precisely because the same tension plays out there, even more visibly. 最简单的解读是怀旧：人们怀念他们成长过程中的事物，仅此而已。但我认为，单凭情感无法解释我们所见现象的规模和持久性。为了更好地理解这一点，我们可以参考一个起初看起来可能很遥远的领域：建筑学。“少即是无聊”（The less is bore）这一论断并非出自平面设计，而是源于建筑评论，恰恰是因为同样的张力在那里表现得更为明显。
Like with Oxygen or Aeroshell, there is currently, for instance, a movement called Architectural Uprising, linked to projects such as The Aesthetic City, which recently conducted a survey comparing classical and modernist architecture. In all of the cases, and in some other surveys, most respondents found classical architecture more appealing than modernist one. While it would be interesting to do a similar survey comparing older skeuomorphic graphic design and the newer minimalist, we can already learn a lot from the example from architecture. 正如 Oxygen 或 Aeroshell 的例子，目前存在一个名为“建筑起义”（Architectural Uprising）的运动，它与“审美城市”（The Aesthetic City）等项目相关联。该项目最近进行了一项对比古典建筑与现代主义建筑的调查。在所有案例及其他一些调查中，大多数受访者认为古典建筑比现代主义建筑更具吸引力。虽然对旧式拟物化平面设计与新式极简主义设计进行类似的调查会很有趣，但我们已经能从建筑学的例子中学到很多。
What these older and newer designs, whether in architecture or on your desktop, actually differ on comes down to two major things: their attitude towards ornamentation, and their understanding of the relationship between form and function. The minimalist and flat approach shuns ornamentation, which often tends to go hand in hand with prioritizing function over form. Within this logic, it makes sense to build a KDE theme, or a building, out of plain rectangles and nothing more. 无论是在建筑还是桌面设计中，这些新旧设计真正的分歧归结为两点：对装饰的态度，以及对形式与功能关系的理解。极简主义和扁平化设计排斥装饰，这往往伴随着“功能优先于形式”的原则。在这种逻辑下，用简单的矩形来构建 KDE 主题或建筑，似乎就变得合乎逻辑了。
The maximalist and skeuomorphic approach, on the other hand, while not neglecting function, is permissive towards things existing simply for the sake of being beautiful. Minimalism’s dominance has been driven by several factors. It isn’t purely an aesthetic or philosophical choice. Some designers, particularly in graphic design, may not be pondering these questions on any abstract level at all; for some it has simply been about chasing trends. 另一方面，最大主义和拟物化设计在不忽视功能的同时，允许事物仅仅为了美而存在。极简主义的统治地位是由多种因素驱动的。这并非纯粹的审美或哲学选择。一些设计师，特别是在平面设计领域，可能根本没有在抽象层面思考过这些问题；对某些人来说，这仅仅是追逐潮流。
But more important than that are the structural reasons. A minimalist approach means less labor, less skill required, and it means the ability to produce more. Just think of how long it takes to craft a skeuomorphic icon compared to a symbolic monochrome one. In a consumerist and ever-faster globalized society, that’s a powerful incentive – one that has little to do with anyone’s design philosophy. Minimalism didn’t win just because designers preferred it. It won, at least in part, because it’s cheaper. And that matters, because it means the yearning for something richer isn’t irrational nostalgia… it’s also a response to being given less than what design can offer. 但比这更重要的是结构性原因。极简主义意味着更少的工作量、更低的技术门槛，以及更高的生产效率。试想一下，制作一个拟物化图标与一个符号化单色图标所需的时间差异。在一个消费主义且日益全球化的快节奏社会中，这是一个强大的激励因素——这与任何人的设计哲学关系不大。极简主义的胜出不仅仅是因为设计师偏爱它，至少在某种程度上，是因为它更便宜。这一点至关重要，因为它意味着对更丰富设计的渴望并非非理性的怀旧……它也是对“设计所能提供的远不止于此”这一事实的回应。
So as the beautifully shot video I’d like to share below puts it, a lot of contemporary design “gets the job done, but not much else.” It’s clean, it’s professional, it’s functional. It’s also boring and hard-pressed to elicit much emotion. The video also raises a point that stuck with me: associating “modern” with “minimalist” is ultimately a choice, not a given. It is us who have come to treat flatness and lack of detail as the markers of contemporaneity. 正如我在下方分享的这部拍摄精美的视频所言，许多当代设计“完成了任务，但仅此而已”。它简洁、专业、实用，但也枯燥乏味，难以激发情感。视频还提出了一个让我印象深刻的观点：将“现代”与“极简”联系起来，归根结底是一种选择，而非必然。是我们自己将扁平化和缺乏细节视为当代性的标志。
That being said… I don’t think going back is the solution. I don’t think reverting to dominantly building buildings the way we did 200 years ago is the answer. I don’t think making Oxygen or a faux-Oxygen the default KDE theme again is the answer either. And here’s why: what the nostalgia aesthetics are pointing at isn’t really just the past. It’s also about “the future that was promised” and never delivered. 话虽如此……我不认为回到过去是解决方案。我不认为重新像 200 年前那样大规模建造房屋是答案，也不认为让 Oxygen 或仿 Oxygen 主题重新成为 KDE 的默认主题是答案。原因在于：怀旧美学所指向的不仅仅是过去，它还指向了那个“曾经被承诺却从未实现”的未来。
Growing up in the 2000s, in the Frutiger Aero era if you will, I genuinely imagined the future was going to look like a sci-fi utopia. That we’d see new, striking buildings made possible by technologies that didn’t exist before, blending cohesively with their environments. Yet instead of that… both in computer design and in architecture, in times when our possibilities are greater than ever, we are far too often producing… dull. grey. boxes. These boxes are everywhere. And neither one of them is particularly different than the other. 在 2000 年代成长起来的我（如果可以称之为 Frutiger Aero 时代），曾真诚地想象未来会像科幻乌托邦一样。我们本应看到由前所未有的技术实现的、令人惊叹的新建筑，与环境和谐地融为一体。然而事实却是……无论是在计算机设计还是建筑领域，在我们拥有比以往任何时候都更多可能性的时代，我们却往往在制造……沉闷、灰暗的盒子。这些盒子无处不在，而且彼此之间毫无区别。
Is this the future we were hoping to live in? That’s the real story underneath the retro-yearning. It isn’t a simply story of people wanting their childhood from the 2000s back. It’s that a lot of ‘the new’ we’ve been offering doesn’t satisfy. It doesn’t have personality. It doesn’t feel warm. It doesn’t feel like it was made with the idea of being anything more than a clean product that gets the job done. The escapism towards the past is a symptom. A symptom of unmet needs, not mere sentiment. 这就是我们希望生活的未来吗？这才是复古渴望背后的真实故事。这不仅仅是人们想要找回 2000 年代童年的简单故事，而是我们所提供的许多“新事物”并不能令人满意。它们缺乏个性，没有温度，感觉就像仅仅是为了做一个“能完成任务的简洁产品”而制造出来的。对过去的逃避是一种症状。一种未被满足的需求的症状，而不仅仅是情感使然。