Eastern & Western Design: How Culture Rewires The Brain

Go to ground.news/designtheory to know where your news is coming from. Sign up or subscribe before Oct 15, 2023 for 30% off unlimited access. Become a patron of my channel: www.patreon.com/JohnMauriello NOTE: The Himba tribe was only very marginally worse at identifying blue (we're talking milliseconds). However, it is true that people who don't have a word for a specific color in their language are worse at identifying it. Whether that has to do with simple linguistics or actual perception is hard to really test. It's probably a bit of both. I just wanted to point out this discrepancy, because the video makes it seem more pronounced than it really is.

Great video, but the reason Japanese joinery came to be the way it is wasn't due to Shinto beliefs or Japanese philosophy. Early Japanese architecture from the Jomon and Yayoi period did NOT employ this method of construction, as the joinery originally came from Ancient China; more precisely, it was the Han dynasty that spread its architectural knowledge over to the Japanese archipelago through the Korean peninsula. This is why China, Korea, and Vietnam ALL have had the same joinery system, not just Japan, even though these countries did not believe in Shinto.

I think what is a bit missing in the historical analysis is how minimalism and functionalism are not consistently 'western' things, but rather a popular trend right now. In different time periods this was not always true.

1. Japan did nail wood together. People of the Pacific Northwest in North America had so many nails from Japanese derelict ships that they made iron tools out of them on a regular basis. 2. Wood on wood joins do not split the wood the way nails do. In many the resulting joint is stiffer, stronger, and longer lasting, and of course consumes no metal.

The thing with the bunny, cat and carrot, the categorical/functional relationship structure, is pretty interesting. I don't recall who/where I read about it but I recall hearing about a musician who used a system like that when writing lyrics - they'd make a list of things that are categorically related to a concept, and a list of things that are functionally related to it, and figure out how to proceed from there, which helped them write things that felt coherent.

As a joiner, i feel i should point out, wood on wood joints are typically stronger and more durable than nail or screw joints, as well as traditional wood glues (though modern PVA is stronger). Nails/screw may even lead to rotting as they damage the woods cellular structure by crushing it and leaching into it. Intricate joinery is just as much a matter of durable design. Part of the reason wood joints have fallen out of western fashion is that furniture is now build as a semi-disposable product rather than something that'll be in your home for most of your life.

The rice cooker example is misleading. If you look at the first electric rice cooker made by Mitsubishi in 1923, it looks remarkably similar to the "Western" rice cooker in the video. That's just the simplest way to make a rice cooker. The reason the Japanese rice cooker is so much more complicated is that they've moved beyond that original design. With rice as a staple that you make every day, it becomes that much more important to be able to customize how you want your rice cooked, set a timer so it's done at exactly the right time, and hold the rice at the right temperature and humidity if you end up with leftovers. That's really why the Japanese design in the video is that much more complicated. Plus many decades of iteration and technology means they're able to make a rice cooker with a more rounded aesthetic. The Western rice cooker retains the original design because steamed rice just doesn't factor as much in European cuisines. There's no need for all this complexity when a simpler machine is easier and cheaper to make.

Native Arabic speaker here who also grew up in America. My brain did a weird thing with the beginning example where it flashed from concave to convex.

Appreciate the pace of your delivery. It's musical, and there are pauses within which to reflect upon what's just been said.

26:12 I was taught that this theory has been debunked very easily long time ago. It's not that they have a hard time distinguishing blue from green, they simply call them the same name because to their culture it doesn't matter if it's one or the other, and their language has developed in a way that doesn't distinguish the two. While to their culture there's a need to differentiate between different shades of green so their language developed different names for each. Just like in English you have separate words for red and pink, yet you don't have separate words for dark blue and light blue. For speakers of many languages like Italian and Russian, that sounds crazy because we have separate words for blue and light blue. But English speakers can still tell which is which, even though they group them together as just "blue".

About the hexagon optical illusion from the beginning, I come from an Arabic-speaking country yet I also use English frequently. When looking at the illusion, interestingly enough, I found myself alternating quickly between both, with both feeling very natural with no two "default". Made me notice how when reading a sentence containing both Arabic and English, my brain is able to switch between both so naturally the same way, proving that it really shapes how our brain functions.

This is one of the best YT videos I have ever watched. Truly remarkable awareness. You, kind sir, are a gem.

I TOTALLY matched the rabbit with the carrot--I can't believe anyone would do differently! So strange! PS: your content is absolutely fantastic. It's evident by the exceptional quality that these take quite a chunk of time to write/make. Just excellent!

The German word for butterfly 'Schmetterling' is derived from the ancient word 'Schmetten' meaning cream. People observed that some butterflies were attracted to cream and butter. That's why they are also called 'butterflies' in English. In Italian 'farfalla' is derived from the sound it makes when it flies. However, in German there are also words derived from sound as well such as 'klatschen' (clap), 'summen' (buzz) etc.

It's fascinating how you didn't mention the architecture of Northern Europe, where joinery has been used for thousands of years for building homes, particularly with regards to log cabins. If you look at traditional wooden boxes from these areas, joins are common. There are large trees in Northern Europe and Northern Japan, making it relatively easy to create long straight boards which can be thick and easy to make thick joins from. If you go to the more arid areas of Southern Europe you have smaller trees in general, with a very different climate. It is a lot harder to create a long thick plank out of a palm tree or a tree which curves a lot, makin wood from taller and thicker trees naturally more expensive, so the relative cost of nails will be lower compared to the valuable thick woods which give a carpenter a lot of room to build a complex join seen in more northern climates. This is just a theory of course.

Excellent video! I'm an interior design student, and, even though your channel mainly focusses about design in general, your videos have been very informative for me

"The beauty and imperfection of aging." That's me at 80; imperfectly beautiful ! I was looking for a description !

Just want to say there are also complex western joints that involve no metal hardware. Drawbore mortises and tenons, breadboard ends, half-blind dovetails to name a few. I agree that Japanese wood joinery is on a whole other level, but I just felt it necessary to mention there is some counterpart in European cultures.

I suggest you take a closer look at traditional Western woodwork methods. As the industrial revolution started in Western countries before spreading to other parts of the world, this is where such skills were discarded or it's used diminished first. I occasionally watched my grandfather, a mere part time carpenter, using a variety of notches and grooves when joining pieces of wood. His joints of choice depended on type of wood, required angles and strengths of joints and in which directions forces went. He often used pegs instead of nails or screws, and only glued when the assembly was intended to be permanent, like a table top or a cabinet side or door.

I have to call out the optical illusion at the immediate beginning of the video. There's no way the "center" hexagon could be convex because of its lighting. The light source is coming from the left side; however, the left side of the "center" hexagon is dark, unlike the right side of it. This suggests that the "center" hexagon is concave. It looks more like a set of six hexagonal tiles arranged around a center point, with a hexagonal hole between them. The only way I can see it as convex is by covering up the rest of the image, in which case it could actually be interpreted either way; but with the edges of the surrounding hexagons, it defeats the illusion.