Last week, I got my first chance to see Tesla’s new Cybertruck up close and personal.
To say that this vehicle has an unusual design is a gross understatement. Autoweek called the Cybertruck’s dramatic lines, sharp corners, and shiny stainless steel panels “a prominent middle finger to everything that has gone before it.”
I agree with the principle of that sentiment. But Autoweek’s take doesn’t capture the long history behind the Cybertruck’s design — or its coming impact.
In reality, the Cybertruck is far more than a childish F you to good taste— it’s a reflection of an emerging, tech-driven design aesthetic that will fundamentally change how the world looks over the next few years and decades.
This emerging style has deep roots in another design school that emerged about a century ago at a similar technological and social moment — and that ultimately led to disaster.
Away from the Natural
Over the last 20 or so years, visual design trends have moved further and further towards the natural, handmade, and organic.
Starting with a resurgence of the environmental movement around the turn of the millennium, the visual design world embraced muted, natural colors, curvy and subtle lines, handmade aesthetics, and earth-inspired materials.
Consumers pivoted from the pointy, angular countertops, furniture, and other objects of the ’80s and ’90s to earthy and organic designs using materials like granite, quartz, and sustainable bamboo. Rough and textured granite countertops, in particular, became an American obsession.
Likewise, the boxy, functional SUVs and cars of the ’80s and ’90s were phased out in favor of vehicles with big swoopy lines, inoffensively muted colors, and gas-saving aerodynamic edges.
In the interior design world, we saw a pivot from the loud colors and synthetic materials of the ’90s to a Marie Kondo-esque minimalism, often echoing the simple and minimal elements of a natural setting.
And in graphics design, the garish colors and sharp edges of the 1980s and 1990s (think the MTV logo ca. 1985) gave way to more subtle, similarly minimalistic designs.
Design trends are complex. But researchers believe these 2000s-era trends were inspired largely by a growing discontent with the increasingly technological world.
As the Dotcom bubble deflated and the Great Recession hit, the 1990s’ obsession with tech faded. Design trends moved in the opposite direction, reflecting a yearning to return to something more naturalistic and minimal.
The Angular Is In
The Tesla Cybertruck reflects a dramatic move away from this decades-long trend. Its robust, jagged angles are decidedly and deliberately human-created. Nothing like this would ever occur in nature. That’s the point.
Likewise, the Cybertruck’s materials reflect an unapologetic pivot away from the natural.
Gleaming stainless steel is one of the most obviously human-created materials in existence. The shiny, mirror-like surface of the Cybertruck is — as Autoweek so insightfully put it — a big middle finger to the world of natural materials and organic forms.
I’ve seen several Cybertrucks on the road here in the Bay Area. Their aggressively unnatural forms stick out like offensive pimples on the face of the Bay Area’s stunning, natural landscapes.
While the Cybertruck is one of the most visually dramatic examples of this new design trend, it’s hardly the only one.
Wildly popular cultural creations like the videogame Minecraft (which has 178 million monthly users as I write this) employ a similarly pointy, angular aesthetic.
This trend towards the unnatural also appears in the broader design world, with broad moves towards pre-Y2K pixelation, roughness, and angularity.
Contemporary artists, too, are increasingly moving away from the natural. Artsy interviewed seven prominent curators about the future of art, and found that many artists are using brightly colored, grid-like squares in their newest work, adding mechanistic elements, or even embracing aggressively unnatural mediums like neon signs.
In interior design and fashion, many designers are embracing sparkly, delineated stripes, monochromatic paint schemes, and other elements you’d never find in nature.
Blame It on AI
What’s behind these changes? Just as the early 2000s shift towards the natural and organic reflected a rejection of tech and modernity, today’s changing design trends reflect a sudden, hard pivot back to it.
We are living in a moment of incredibly fast-paced technological change. Artificial intelligence is evolving so rapidly that our human minds and institutions can’t keep up.
Three years ago, state-of-the-art AI was laughably bad at carrying on a conversation and could do little more than generate pixelated images of avocado chairs.
Today, the most advanced generative AI systems can create movie-quality visuals, easily deepfake any person, mimic our voices, write novels, and much else.
Similar breakthroughs in medicine (with emerging tech like CRISPR), clean energy (with successful experiments in fusion), and other fields hammer home the point that tech is advancing faster than we can comprehend.
It’s exciting. And today’s changing design trends reflect this. Our newfound move towards starkly unnatural, angular designs, human-made materials, and boxy pixelation capture our fascination with the massive technological changes that are remaking our lives.
The Cybertruck, in other words, doesn’t stand alone; it’s an aesthetic reflection of society’s collective embrace of fast-moving, world-changing new technologies.
These trends also reflect our emergence from the COVID-19 pandemic. After years of stasis and fear, the world suddenly feels gloriously movable and dynamic again. Our design choices are picking up that dynamism.
Even when parked, the Cybertruck looks like it’s constantly rushing forward.
Everything Old is New Again
These tech-driven design trends feel new to us, but they actually have deep historical roots.
In the 1920s, the world was emerging from the horrors of World War I and the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.
Similarly to today, the 1920s were also a moment of incredible technological change. Electrification, the telephone, air travel, cheap cars, and many more new technologies rapidly reshaped the 1920s world.
These changes gave birth to a prosperous era we now call the Roaring ’20s. But they also gave birth to an artistic movement, the Art Deco movement.
Art Deco design captures the technological optimism and excitement of that moment. With an emphasis on speed and progress, Art Deco stood in total opposition to the more naturalistic Arts and Crafts movement that preceded it.
Embracing jagged, geometrical lines, human-made materials like chrome and enamel, streamlining, and soaring monumental aesthetics, the Art Deco movement reflected the era’s emphasis on change, novelty and tech-inspired beauty.
Perhaps the best example of the Art Deco style is the 1927 film Metropolis. Its imagined future city is an Art Deco wonderland that captures many of the aesthetics of the movement.
The impact of the Art Deco movement was far-reaching and significant. Art Deco themes were integrated into architecture, art, interior design, and more. Buildings like 30 Rockefeller Center in New York City are lasting examples of the movement’s aesthetic.
The Art Deco movement even influenced automotive design. Zoom in on the jagged, stainless steel grille of an Art Deco car from the 1920s, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that you’re looking at a contemporary image of the Tesla Cybertruck.
In many ways, the emerging design trends we’re seeing today mirror the aesthetics of the Art Deco movement. The same emphasis on embracing and celebrating technology, on speed, geometric angles, and human-made materials is present both in modern objects like the Cybertruck and objects that preceded it by a century or more.
Again, given the similar contexts, that’s not surprising. In both the historical moment of the 1920s and the moment we find ourselves in today, technology is creating massive societal change.
Even the obsession with movement and speed — as society emerges from the stasis and stagnation of two pandemics separated by a century — is consistent between the Art Deco movement and the emerging design shift we’re seeing today.
A Cautionary Tale
Based on these similarities, I expect that the Tesla Cybertruck is just the tip of the iceberg.
As AI continues to remake society, we’ll see contemporary design embrace even more of the aesthetics we last saw during the Art Deco movement.
Roughness, muted colors, minimalism, and organic elements will fade. Artificial materials, jagged angles, maximalism, and an emphasis on speed and technological excitement will replace them.
As this newest aesthetic emerges, though, we need to be careful.
The Art Deco movement bred some beautiful design innovations, including many structures that still stand today. The movement’s influence can be felt everywhere from the walls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the aisles of Target.
But Art Deco also has a dark side. As the 1920s gave way to the 1930s, the movement’s excitement and dynamism were gradually co-opted by a cult of techno-devotion which ultimately led to fascism.
Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany both embraced the progress-oriented elements of Art Deco, perverting its technological optimism in horrifying and inhuman ways.
That should serve as a cautionary tale. Technological excitement is great. Given the power of today’s AI, it’s certainly warranted.
But as we embrace the emergence of ultra-powerful AI and other technologies — and the new design aesthetic that appears to be accompanying it — we can’t lose sight of the human and natural elements that tech risks supplanting.
Art Deco designs are beautiful, but they’re also cold and impersonal. It’s no coincidence that the Art Deco style is used most often for grandiose public buildings, while most homes borrow elements from the more nature-oriented Arts and Crafts movement that preceded it.
Both in the world of design and in our interactions with emerging tech like generative AI, we need to embrace the excitement and power of our moment. But we must also preserve the human and natural elements that Art Deco ignored — or sought to destroy.
Cybertrucks are beautiful design objects. But not every car should look like one.
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