Shuichiro Ogawa
日本語

Notes · updated 2026-08-28

The Room of Bad Taste Closed After Two Weeks

In 1852, an odd room opened at Marlborough House in London.

Eighty-seven products chosen by Henry Cole and Richard Redgrave were lined up inside. Every one of them was something the two men had judged to be in bad taste. A floral-patterned carpet, a gas lamp with naturalistic ornament, wallpaper painted in perspective. The exhibition was named “Examples of False Principles in Decoration,” but visitors soon began calling it something else. The Chamber of Horrors.

The intention was clear. Show bad design in the flesh, and educate consumers’ taste. It was a design in which experts taught the public how to judge quality.

It closed after two weeks. The manufacturers who had been named protested (Suga 2004). Of the 87 pieces, only 17 have had their current whereabouts confirmed.

This episode offers two questions to the current debate over AI slop. Why did the countermeasure of naming bad things collapse? And on what grounds could the people doing the naming call something “bad” in the first place?

The Design Profession Was Created as a Countermeasure to Shoddy Mass Production

Let’s check the sequence first.

In 1835 and 1836, the British Parliament convened the Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures. The motive for the deliberation was neither aesthetic nor cultural. It was an industrial crisis: British manufactured goods’ designs were inferior to those of foreign products, and Britain was losing the export competition. The second report asked what the best means were of extending among the manufacturing population a knowledge of the principles of art and design.

The answer was the Government School of Design of 1837, later the Royal College of Art. Schools of art were then set up in industrial cities across the country, and the school left Somerset House for a purpose-built building in South Kensington (Lawrence 2014). Cole also created a journal. The Journal of Design and Manufactures (1849–52) was a campaigning periodical that discussed the principles of design and copyright. Owen Jones codified the laws of ornament in The Grammar of Ornament (1856), and Wornum compiled his lectures at the Government School of Design into a stylistic-history textbook.

In other words, design education, the codification of design theory, and the design museum were all institutionalized as countermeasures to the problem of low-quality mass production. What Kriegel (2007) depicted was the process by which reformers declared a “crisis of design and craftsmanship” and addressed it through the apparatus of design schools, design copyright, and the Great Exhibition.

Design was the first countermeasure to slop.

Did the Countermeasure Work?

The institution survived. But its effectiveness was doubtful even at the time.

Measell (2020) examined, using local historical records, what the Stourbridge School of Art, founded in 1851, actually brought to the local glass industry. The art teachers failed to build ties with the industry, and funding and personal involvement from the manufacturing side were both limited. The connection between design education and industry did not hold up as well on the ground as it did on paper.

The normative side is also unsettled. Jones’s Grammar was long read as a precursor of modern design, but Sloboda (2008) criticized that reading as anachronistic and reread the book as a cosmopolitan project that integrated industrial value with imperial value. The universal laws of ornament stand on plates that the British Empire had collected.

Placed in this context, the fact that Cole’s Chamber of Horrors closed after two weeks also takes on a different meaning. Naming gives the named party a motive to fight back. A countermeasure that publicly designates something as bad always takes on the politics of who holds the authority to designate.

The Debate over Machines and Authenticity Recurred in the Same Form Again and Again

The argument that blames machines for a decline in quality has a long genealogy.

Ruskin (1853) wrote that the division of labor and machines strip thought from the craftsman and turn a human being into part of a machine. Taking this up, Morris argued for the revival of craftsmanship, stating that the machine saves the hand but harms the spirit (1888). Loos touched the same problem from the opposite side. Ornament is wasted labor, health, material, and capital, was the claim of his 1910 lecture. At Cologne in 1914, Muthesius proposed standardizing types suited to mass production, van de Velde responded by defending individuality, and the Werkbund came to the brink of a split. Benjamin (1935–39) discussed the loss of aura, but read it not only as decline but also as political possibility. After the war came Max Bill’s “good form,” came Ulm, and standardized goodness became an educational system.

The point at issue is nearly the same every time. When something can be made cheaply, quickly, and in large quantities, what happens to the maker’s judgment and to the authenticity of the work?

Before applying this genealogy directly to the present, though, two qualifications are needed.

First, the actors involved were not as simple as the received story makes them out to be. When Harvey and Press (1991) examined the production practices of Morris & Co. using business-history records, they found that machines and handwork were used together. The story that Morris rejected machines outright does not hold up at the level of actual practice. As for Loos’s lecture too, Long (2009) has corrected, from primary sources, the error in the theory that it was written in 1908.

Second, the very distinction between handwork and machine work has itself been called into question. Pye (1968) distinguished work whose outcome depends on judgment made during production from work whose outcome is decided before the work begins. What he said was that this distinction is what matters, and that hand versus machine is not a technical question. The sister note ai-slop-design-creativity read generated output as a third mode within Pye’s framework, and the fact that Pye himself had relativized the dichotomy does not weaken that reading but supports it. What should be asked is where the risk lies, not what the tool is.

The Judgment of “Bad Taste” Was Also an Instrument of Class and Gender

This is perhaps the strongest thing design history has learned over the past century.

Greenberg (1939) defined kitsch as a product that mechanically mass-produces vicarious experience and faked sensations. Broch condemned it ethically, while Moles (1971) analyzed it, within a semiotic framework, as a technique of happiness. Adorno and Horkheimer’s theory of the culture industry criticized the standardization and pseudo-individualization of mass-produced cultural goods.

But from whose position was this judgment being handed down?

What Bourdieu (1979) showed was that taste judgment is a product of class-based habitus, functioning as a symbolic instrument that reproduces class distinctions. From the side of design history, more concrete criticisms have emerged. Buckley (1986) argued that the writing of design history itself was constructed patriarchally, marginalizing women as designers, as consumers, and as objects of representation alike. Sparke (1995) traced the history in which taste was gendered feminine and design gendered masculine, and in which modernism’s “good design” norm devalued women’s material culture. Attfield (2000) demonstrated a method for incorporating the miscellaneous, non-masterpiece objects of everyday life into historical writing. Ober’s (2025) study of Ulm verified, from the archives, that the ideal of rational, functional, and socially responsible design was reproducing social stratification in actual admissions selection.

And a reversal also occurred. Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour (1972) defended the sign architecture of Las Vegas as “ugly and ordinary,” pushing back against modernism’s elitist taste norms. Sontag’s (1964) theory of camp and Jencks’s (1977) theory of postmodern architecture likewise stand on the side of elements once dismissed as bad taste.

Given all this, one is tempted to say that the judgment of bad taste is an instrument of power. But stopping there falls into a different oversimplification.

Halle (1993) visited 160 households near New York and examined the paintings on their walls and the ornaments they had on display. What he tested were Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption, the Frankfurt School’s theory of ideological domination, and Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital. The conclusion was that none of the three applies in any straightforward way. Holt (1998) likewise called for a revision of cultural-capital theory, and Gans (1974), from the position that multiple taste cultures coexist side by side, criticized the very project of mass-culture critique.

That the norms of taste were class-based is certain. Whether that norm actually determined people’s taste remains a separate question.

Design History Learned to Doubt Its Own Way of Writing

There is another lesson, this one on the side of method.

Pevsner (1936) depicted modern design as a lineage of pioneers running from Morris to Gropius. This narrative stood as the standard account for a long time, but Sunwoo (2010) examined, from publishing history, the retitling for the 1949 MoMA edition and showed that editorial changes had been made to make modernism appear more fluid, in line with the museum’s own purposes. The heroic saga was also a story carrying institutional interests.

The object of study has also shifted. Forty (1986) treated changes in design not as the product of individual creativity but as the product of production, capital, and social relations, and Attfield showed a method for admitting non-masterpiece objects into history. The Design History Society was founded in 1977, and the Journal of Design History was launched in 1988, as the field split off from art history. When Margolin (1992, 1995) proposed subsuming the field under design studies, Woodham (1995) countered that the very vagueness of its boundaries was its virtue. In recent years, decolonization debates have been added (Schultz et al. 2018), and the concept of the transnational has been brought in from East Asia (Kikuchi & Lee 2014).

According to Jia’s (2024) bibliometric analysis, research on the design history of everyday life is increasing, but its theoretical achievements remain at the stage of conceptual understanding.

One lesson can be drawn from this. A method for writing the history of things made anonymously and in bulk has not yet been established. And AI-generated output is made precisely anonymously and in bulk.

Homogenization Was Already Happening Before AI Arrived

Seen from the side of design history, this is the most troublesome fact of all.

Goree, Doosti, Crandall, and Su (2021) applied computational methods to website images from 2003 to 2019 and showed that design has grown significantly more similar since 2007. The average distance between page layouts has shrunk by more than 30%. The factors that emerged from interviews with 11 experienced web designers were the sharing of source code and libraries, the standardization of color schemes, and mobile responsiveness. Not generative AI.

Maudet (2025) traced the history of design templates and argued that, while they arose as a response to the task of “democratizing design,” they also carry a two-sided character: separating content from form subordinates the maker’s discretion to the platform’s structure. Tang et al.’s (2025) survey of 71 people likewise confirmed a strong correlation between template use by non-professionals and convergence in style. Professional designers show resistance, but they cannot escape the platform’s structure.

Looking further back, Muthesius’s standardization proposal came in 1914, Gute Form came in 1949, and GM’s annual model change dates from 1927. Clarke (1999) analyzed GM’s Art and Colour Section as a form of managerial risk control and pointed out that GM cars were not necessarily the most advanced or fashionable ones on the market. Standardization, the recycling of style, and design for the sake of sales all came first.

The way of putting it, that “generative AI homogenized design,” is therefore not historically correct. What can correctly be said is that generative AI added a new pathway to a homogenization that was already under way.

Placed in This Genealogy, What Does AI Slop Look Like?

Three things can be said.

First, the way of talking about something as “looking AI-made and tacky” risks taking Cole’s seat. A judgment that names the appearance of generated output as bad taste has the same structure as the exhibition that closed after two weeks in 1852. Unless it takes on the question of whose taste sets the standard, that judgment squarely absorbs the criticism that has come down since Bourdieu.

Second, the definition set out in the sister note ai-slop-design-creativity avoids this danger. If slop is defined as “pushing something unverified onto someone else,” the judgment shifts away from the aesthetic properties of the generated output and onto the distribution of burden between maker and recipient. This definition still stands even after passing through a century of criticism concerning the class character of taste. This is where the advantage lies, seen from the side of design history.

Third, what is newest of all is the inversion of position. Design was a profession institutionalized as a countermeasure to mass-produced shoddiness. Now, that same profession stands on the side of generation. Designers themselves now occupy the position of the manufacturers Cole once named.

What Is Different This Time

Before dismissing this as a repetition of history, three qualifications are needed.

First, the scale and speed differ. The 1851 Great Exhibition took years to gather its objects. Generated output multiplies by the second. But this is a difference of degree, not of kind.

Second, the position of the maker differs. The machine that Ruskin criticized had, behind it, the factory, the capital, and the workers who operated it. The output of a generative model has no maker in that sense. In Pye’s terms, no one occupies the position of production who takes on the uncertainty while the outcome remains uncertain.

Third, the instrument of judgment differs. Cole could line up the actual objects. The exhibition rested on the premise that bad design can be recognized just by looking. Generated output has no such premise. People can distinguish AI-generated poems only at below-chance accuracy (46.6% discrimination accuracy), yet they consistently rate a work lower once told it is AI-made (ai-slop-design-creativity). A Chamber of Horrors cannot be built today.

When This Reading Fails

Three points, set down here.

First, if the critique of the class character of taste is being overextended. What Halle’s (1993) study of 160 households showed was that the explanation, that norms determine taste, does not hold up in any simple way. If so, reading the judgment “looking AI-made and tacky” as class struggle may itself be an overapplication of theory.

Second, if the continuity of homogenization is being overstated. What Goree et al. (2021) measured was website layout, not the style of generated images. There is no guarantee that convergence driven by templates and convergence toward a model’s default image are the same mechanism. The claim of continuity remains a hypothesis unless it is remeasured with comparable metrics.

Third, if the formula “design was the first countermeasure to slop” is too Britain-centered. The 1837 school is a British story. Whether design education in Germany, France, and Japan began from the same motive has not been verified within the scope of this note. Seen from the transnational perspective that Kikuchi and Lee (2014) called for, this origin story too is a single-nation history.

The scope must also be bounded. This note is heavily skewed toward Anglophone sources. No historical study measuring quality itself, in either functional or visual terms, under the heading of “the democratization of design” was found in this collection. Many design-history books lack a DOI, and some items were instead confirmed via their ISBN and publisher page.

Timeline

YearEvent
1835–36British Parliament’s Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures
1837Government School of Design founded
1841Pugin, The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture
1849–52Journal of Design and Manufactures published
1851The Great Exhibition, London
1852Semper’s critique of the Exhibition / Cole and Redgrave’s Chamber of Horrors, closed after two weeks
1853Ruskin, “The Nature of Gothic”
1856Jones, The Grammar of Ornament / Wornum, Analysis of Ornament
1888Morris, “The Revival of Handicraft”
1907Deutscher Werkbund founded
1910Loos’s “Ornament and Crime” lecture
1914The Typenstreit at the Cologne conference (Muthesius vs. van de Velde)
1923Gropius, “Art and Technology, a New Unity”
1927GM establishes its Art and Colour Section
1932Bernard London proposes planned obsolescence
1935–39Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”
1936Pevsner, Pioneers of the Modern Movement
1939Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”
1944/47Adorno and Horkheimer’s theory of the culture industry
1949Max Bill, “Die gute Form”
1953–68Ulm School of Design (Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm)
1960Packard, The Waste Makers
1968Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship
1971Papanek, Design for the Real World / Moles, Le Kitsch
1972Venturi et al., Learning from Las Vegas
1977Design History Society founded / Jencks’s theory of postmodern architecture
1979Bourdieu, La Distinction
1984Dilnot, “The State of Design History”
1986Forty, Objects of Desire / Buckley, “Made in Patriarchy”
1988Journal of Design History launched
1993Halle, Inside Culture (study of 160 households)
1995Sparke, As Long as It’s Pink / the Margolin–Woodham debate
2000Attfield, Wild Things
2007Web design homogenization begins (as measured by Goree et al. 2021)
2018Design and Culture’s decolonization special issue
2021Goree et al. empirically measure web design homogenization
2025Maudet discusses the two-sidedness of templates / Ober examines admissions selection at Ulm
  • ai-slop-design-creativity: The sister note that read slop as the externalization of verification. This note shows that its definition can pass through design history’s critique of taste.
  • slop-countermeasures-history: The technical history of countermeasures. The Chamber of Horrors is among the earliest examples corresponding to the failure modes of “bias in errors” and “the political cost of naming” set out there.
  • design-craft-relationship-industry: An overview of the relationship between craft and design seen from the industry side. It also touches on the reception of Pye and Sennett.
  • generative-art-literature: A map of the academic research on generative art. The genealogy running from information aesthetics to diffusion models is here.
  • design-value-dimensions: An overview that captures the value of design across multiple dimensions. A premise for not reducing taste judgment to a single dimension of value.
  • design-democratization-justification: An examination of how the democratization of design has been justified. The two-sidedness of templates connects to this note.
  • maker-to-editor-paradigm: The shift in role from maker to editor. An account of the inversion of position seen from the side of the profession.

References

Nineteenth-Century British Design Reform (Primary Sources)

Nineteenth-Century British Design Reform (Scholarship)

  • Romans, M. (2007). An Analysis of the Political Complexion of the 1835/6 Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures. International Journal of Art & Design Education 26(2), 215–224. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1476-8070.2007.00531.x
  • Suga, Y. (2004). Designing the Morality of Consumption: “Chamber of Horrors” at the Museum of Ornamental Art, 1852–53. Design Issues 20(4), 43–56. https://doi.org/10.1162/0747936042312048
  • Sloboda, S. (2008). The Grammar of Ornament: Cosmopolitanism and Reform in British Design. Journal of Design History 21(3), 223–236. https://doi.org/10.1093/jdh/epn025
  • Jespersen, J. K. (2008). Originality and Jones’ The Grammar of Ornament of 1856. Journal of Design History 21(2), 143–153. https://doi.org/10.1093/jdh/epn008
  • Lawrence, R. (2014). The Evolution of the Victorian Art School. The Journal of Architecture 19(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2014.884842
  • Measell, J. S. (2020). Design Education for Industry: The Impact of the Stourbridge School of Art upon the Local Glass Enterprises, 1850–1905. Midland History 45(3). https://doi.org/10.1080/0047729X.2020.1814639
  • Kriegel, L. (2007). Grand Designs: Labor, Empire, and the Museum in Victorian Culture. Duke University Press. https://www.dukeupress.edu/grand-designs
  • Bonython, E. & Burton, A. (2003). The Great Exhibitor: The Life and Work of Henry Cole. V&A Publications. ISBN 1851773266
  • Burton, A. (1999). Vision and Accident: The Story of the Victoria and Albert Museum. V&A Publications. ISBN 9781851772926
  • Frayling, C. (2010). Henry Cole and the Chamber of Horrors: The Curious Origins of the V&A. V&A Publishing. ISBN 978-1-85177-623-8
  • Auerbach, J. A. (1999). The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-08007-7

Machine Production and Authenticity

Kitsch and the Politics of Taste

The Methodology of Design Historiography

Planned Obsolescence and Homogenization

  • London, B. (1932). Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/72003/72003-h/72003-h.htm
  • Packard, V. (1960). The Waste Makers. David McKay Co.
  • Slade, G. (2006). Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-02203-3
  • Krajewski, M. (2014). The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy. IEEE Spectrum 51, 56–61. https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-great-lightbulb-conspiracy
  • Bulow, J. (1986). An Economic Theory of Planned Obsolescence. Quarterly Journal of Economics 101(4), 729–749. https://doi.org/10.2307/1884176
  • Strausz, R. (2009). Planned Obsolescence as an Incentive Device for Unobservable Quality. The Economic Journal 119(540), 1405–1421. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0297.2009.02290.x
  • Clarke, S. (1999). Managing Design: The Art and Colour Section at General Motors, 1927-1941. Journal of Design History 12(1), 65–79. https://doi.org/10.1093/jdh/12.1.65
  • Meikle, J. L. (1979/2001). Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial Design in America, 1925-1939. Temple University Press. ISBN 978-1566398930
  • Papanek, V. (1971). Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change. Pantheon Books.
  • Whiteley, N. (1993). Design for Society. Reaktion Books. ISBN 978-0948462474
  • Goree, S., Doosti, B., Crandall, D. & Su, N. M. (2021). Investigating the Homogenization of Web Design: A Mixed-Methods Approach. CHI ‘21. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445156
  • Maudet, N. (2025). Design Templates: Between Empowerment and Control of Amateur Graphic Designers. Design Issues 41(1), 38–50. https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_a_00792
  • Tang, S., Xu, T., Ding, R., Chang, J. N. & Li, G. (2025). Drowning in the same style: How database creation within online design platforms affects visual style homogenization. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666188825006896
  • Bick, R., Halsey, E. & Ekenga, C. C. (2018). The global environmental injustice of fast fashion. Environmental Health 17, 92. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12940-018-0433-7
  • Drucker, J. & McVarish, E. (2008/2012). Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide. Pearson/Prentice Hall. ISBN 978-0132410755

Unverified Items

The unverified items for the full corpus (116 sources) are at the end of source/review/slop-design-history/papers.md. Collected here are the ones relevant to the body text.

  • The page range of the English translation of Semper (1852) (trans. Mallgrave & Herrmann, Cambridge UP, 1989) has not been confirmed on the publisher’s page.
  • The publication history of Loos’s lecture relies on Long (2009). The account of how Kulka altered the date to 1908 in the 1931 reprint is a citation from that same article, and has not been directly confirmed against primary sources.
  • How Benjamin’s versions are counted (whether the second version is treated as the Urtext) varies among researchers. The body text avoided specifying a particular version.
  • The original exhibition catalogue for Max Bill’s “Die gute Form” (1949) has not been accessed; the body relies on secondary information.
  • The frequently quoted line “We do not reject the machine, we welcome it” could not be confirmed as attributable to either Morris or C. R. Ashbee, so it was not used in the body text.
  • The DOI for Buckley (1986), and reconfirmation of the bibliographic details of Sparke (1995), Venturi et al. (1972), and Olalquiaga (1998) against the publishers’ official pages, remain incomplete. The bibliographic entries themselves agree across multiple independent sources.
  • The print run of Adorno and Horkheimer’s 1944 private edition has not been confirmed.
  • The name and month of the conference that led to the founding of the Design History Society could not be confirmed on the official page. There is information giving “September 1977, Brighton,” but it has not been adopted.
  • The journal name and volume/issue for Tang et al. (2025) are unconfirmed (ScienceDirect does not make the full text available).
  • What Goree et al. (2021) measured was website layout, not the style of generated images. Whether convergence driven by templates and convergence toward a model’s default image are the same mechanism has not been verified.
  • The formula “the design profession was institutionalized as a countermeasure to mass-produced shoddiness” is based on the British case (1835–37). Whether design education in Germany, France, and Japan began from the same motive has not been verified within the scope of this note.
  • No prior literature stating this formula explicitly in this form was found within the scope of this search. Kriegel (2007) comes closest, but that book does not itself state that “design was the first countermeasure to slop.” The exhaustiveness of the search is not guaranteed.

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