On the Flattening of Spatial Experience

Feed by Living Cult

Images left to right, top to bottom: @maison.singulier, @koketit, @j.brian, @part_interior, @johannesbudde, @housesafari

In recent years, the design of interiors and objects has grown increasingly sensitive to the demands of digital platforms. A room may still be built for the people who inhabit it, but it is often first staged for the camera. This shift, from spatial to visual and from lived to captured, has reshaped not only how designers work, but also how design is consumed. Surfaces are optimized for light, corners for symmetry, and color palettes for coherence across a nine-square grid. In this context, spatial experience becomes flattened; crafted to be seen, not necessarily to be felt.

This is not a judgment, but an observation from within. Many young designers, myself included, operate at the intersection of image-making and spatial design. We create content to share ideas, test atmospheres, and connect with a broader audience. It’s a powerful tool for communication and engagement. Yet, as the algorithmic eye becomes the primary client, it is worth asking what is lost in translation. When spaces are optimized for shareability, what happens to those qualities that evade easy framing: circulation, acoustics, texture, or the slow unfolding of time within a space?

The camera inherently favors clarity and stillness. It rewards a specific genre of design: front-facing, tightly composed, emotionally legible at a glance. This genre privileges surfaces and moments over sequences and atmospheres. Yet, when every interior must function as content, spatial thinking risks dissolving into styling; not superficial in intent, but prone to repetition and imitation. Design begins to lose its contextual specificity, its responsiveness to particular users or places. Instead, it becomes a series of visual tropes, recognizable and replicable.

Image by The Design Files Magazine

A critical part of this shift is what might be called aesthetic mimicking: the uncritical reproduction of certain visual languages or forms detached from their original context, concept, or material logic. A color palette borrowed without regard to the local environment; a form repeated without understanding its ergonomic or cultural roots. This phenomenon is not new but has accelerated within the rapid circulation of images online. The risk is that design becomes an echo of an echo where the image outpaces the lived experience it purports to represent.

This mimicking often doesn’t happen through making, but through buying. Aesthetic fluency has become a form of consumer performance; the fastest way to access a desired identity is to purchase the objects that visually signal it. The desire to create content often leads to the desire to own content-worthy things: a boucle chair, a checkered rug, a wavy mirror. Buying becomes the method through which one participates in design culture, and platforms encourage this cycle. The feed rewards newness, and newness rewards consumption. In this loop, styling isn’t just visual, it’s transactional. The home becomes a stage for demonstrating taste, updated seasonally or algorithmically. And in the rush to acquire the right image, the deeper, slower work of inhabiting space can be lost.

This cycle is further complicated by a market flooded with disposable “dupes and DIY products, hacks”; fast furniture and decor items that mimic high-design pieces without honoring their process, provenance, or ethical considerations. These copies often rely on exploitative labor and environmentally harmful materials, offering access at a significant cost. They dilute the language of design, reducing it to surface-level aesthetics divorced from meaning or sustainability.

Image by OTTI

Yet, despite these challenges, photography and image-making remain essential components of design today. Staging a space, documenting it, and sharing it are acts of communication, not mere vanity. The question is not whether we design for the screen, we already do,but how to do so in a way that remains connected to the physical, ethical, and emotional dimensions of a space. It is a call to resist the temptation of flattening the complexity of spatial experience into a single frame or fleeting moment.

Designers now inhabit a critical tension, balancing between the demands of the digital feed and the realities of embodied experience. This tension calls for a nuanced approach: creating spaces that resonate both in person and online, that are accessible without lapsing into generic uniformity, that celebrate beauty without erasing history or context. It requires attentiveness to materials, processes, and the stories embedded in objects and places.

Image by The Invisible Party and Material Monday

Perhaps the challenge is not to reject the image but to inhabit it differently; to treat photography not as a final product, but as an invitation to deeper engagement. The grid and the feed are here to stay, but so too is the room, with its shifting light, imperfect acoustics, and human rhythms. Design lives best in the space between these worlds, where the digital and the physical inform one another without erasing their differences.

*All photographs and videos featured in this article were captured by the author unless a specific image states otherwise.