Design convergence: why all kinds of products end up looking alike

Luke Wroblewski (LukeW) has published a short note, dated 9 October 2026, asking why product design seems to be homogenising. After years of seeing posts arguing that design has become uniform, he gathered historical and modern designs across several product categories (TVs, phones, cars, etc.). According to him, the pattern is visible without squinting. What remains to be answered is why.

He poses several open questions: do we eventually arrive at a final form? Does everything regress to the mean as mediocrity creeps in? Is it driven by what is possible or profitable in the supply chain? Or is everyone simply copying everyone else? He then lists the arguments that, he says, are made most often.

First argument: once a product's purpose is clear, design can get out of the way. A TV is for watching a picture, so the ideal TV is almost all picture. The same would apply to smartphones, cash registers and other products.

Second argument: the more mature a technology is, the more it competes on price and specs. Standing out is risky and expensive, so fewer companies do it. Those that do tend to be smaller, with fewer resources and less reach, and so struggle to break out of niche markets.

Third argument: nature does it too. Crustaceans repeatedly and independently evolve into crab-like forms, a phenomenon known as carcinisation. Someone has suggested calling the consumer-product version "crabitalism" (a pun on "crab" and "capitalism").

Fourth argument: physics and constraints. Aerodynamics, thermal management and materials push cars and planes towards similar shapes. Constraints do the same: planes are designed around airports and cars around safety regulations. If the job the product has to do changes (an F1 car, a fighter jet), the design changes too.

The author notes that software is even more susceptible to this convergence. According to him, every app is being "chatified" (the post includes a video on this) even though only a few years have passed since ChatGPT launched. In hardware, by contrast, convergence used to take decades.

In that context, he describes current AI hardware as a set of experiments: pins, glasses, earbuds and even pendants. It remains to be seen which of them, if any, end up in the "right-hand column" of his comparisons, that is, among the designs that have already converged. For now, he sees it as a design playground.

Note on the material: the text received is a short blog post. The images and visual comparisons it refers to were not included in the download, so this summary is limited to the arguments set out in the text. The page closes with a quote attributed to "Unknown": "Design is the art of gradually applying constraints until only one solution remains."