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kwbat12's review against another edition
4.0
This is very interesting. It is a study of certain families in LA, with focus on their home spaces and the sheer amount of things that are inside of them. It includes interesting statistics as it looks closely at the home and how it has changed over the years. From a sociology standpoint, this is incredibly interesting.
nefariousfondue's review against another edition
informative
slow-paced
3.75
The introduction is a bit hard to get through. It's remarkably dense and constantly repeats itself about the work done to make the project happen.
Once you get through that, though, it's a pretty quick read. The writing itself is dry, but informative.
It's a fascinating topic, with wonderful supporting photographs. I found myself wishing there had been more looks at each individual family and their lifestyles. I feel that, with as small a sampling as 32 families, that would have been possible. While being about humans, this book is sadly lacking in the human element beyond quotes and photos.
It's a good scientific look at that particular sampling of houses in that particular time period. I would be very interested to see a similar study conducted on a larger scale and with more attention to all the little things that were not counted in closets and the like.
I would have liked a section on closets and clothes specifically. Most of the people I know - myself included - have stuffed closets full of clothes they never wear and abandoned purses and shoes. I think that would have been fascinating.
Once you get through that, though, it's a pretty quick read. The writing itself is dry, but informative.
It's a fascinating topic, with wonderful supporting photographs. I found myself wishing there had been more looks at each individual family and their lifestyles. I feel that, with as small a sampling as 32 families, that would have been possible. While being about humans, this book is sadly lacking in the human element beyond quotes and photos.
It's a good scientific look at that particular sampling of houses in that particular time period. I would be very interested to see a similar study conducted on a larger scale and with more attention to all the little things that were not counted in closets and the like.
I would have liked a section on closets and clothes specifically. Most of the people I know - myself included - have stuffed closets full of clothes they never wear and abandoned purses and shoes. I think that would have been fascinating.
adrianhon's review against another edition
4.0
Introduction
- In general, it’s fascinating to look inside a wide range of American households. The houses were not specially tidied for the photographer so it’s a raw and realistic portrait.
- The photos were taken from 2001-2005, so they’re pretty dated.
- They didn’t look inside cupboards or wardrobes or boxes. I’m sure this is partly unavoidable due to privacy concerns, but it would skew the findings somewhat. Neither did they count “abundant stacks of papers, mail, and magazines, which we deemed impossible to tally with accuracy…”
- If you were doing the study today, you’d get a grad student to walk inside with a SLR or 4K video camera and try to use machine vision to classify everything. If it worked well, you could identify every visible book, album, picture, and even do stuff like estimate the total mass and volume of objects. It’d make for a good cross-departmental research project.
- The authors spend a little too long talking about just how much work the project took, which I don’t doubt but probably doesn’t warrant mentioning so many times. We already bought the book!
If you’re wondering how the researchers selected the 32 houses, this book won’t tell you. I assume the process is detailed in one of the original research papers, but it’s surprising they don’t include it here.
General & Storage
- Americans own way more shit than I ever imagined. No wonder you’re all in debt.
- A lovely turn of phrase: the US is the “most materially rich society in global history”.
- At the time of writing, the US had 3.1% of world’s children, but 40% of the spending on toys.
One parent: “The closet is extremely unutilised because we usually can’t get to it.”
- “Cars have been banished from 75% of garages to make way for rejected furniture and cascading bins and boxes of mostly forgotten household goods.” The authors estimate that 90% of the total square footage of garages in Los Angeles is used for storage.
Kitchens & Food
- “The typical Los Angeles refrigerator front panel is host to a mean of 52 objects.”
- Making dinners with “mostly” convenience foods is only about 10% (or 5 minutes) faster than dinners that use mostly raw ingredients. Measured differently, convenience foods involve 26 minutes of “hands on” preparation time, versus 38 min for raw foods (excluding any oven/microwave time). A 12 minute different in preparation time isn’t as small a margin as the authors make it out to be, especially for busy and tired parents, but they do point out that convenience foods reduce complexity and shopping/planning time.
- 14% of meals were from take out!
- “Stockpiling is an efficient foraging strategy for parents who want to minimise the number of times they have round up young children…”
Everything Else
- No-one uses their back yards.
- Most of the houses are single storey, including the big ones.
- I would love to see a longitudinal study to observed the effects of the recession and the impact of smartphones and tablets on the total material load inside US households.
- Toilets have been unchanged in form for many decades. I note that out of all the rich tech companies I have visited over the years, only Google X had those fancy Japanese toilet/bidets.
- This has not aged well: “At no point during tens of thousands of years of human history have people been as deeply engaged with nonessential technologies as we are today. Ownership of devices associated with entertainment and mobile communication has escalated from fad to addiction.” I should add that the edition I read was published in June 2017, long after it had become apparent that computers cannot be considered “nonessential technologies” that are only good for addictions.
- In general, it’s fascinating to look inside a wide range of American households. The houses were not specially tidied for the photographer so it’s a raw and realistic portrait.
- The photos were taken from 2001-2005, so they’re pretty dated.
- They didn’t look inside cupboards or wardrobes or boxes. I’m sure this is partly unavoidable due to privacy concerns, but it would skew the findings somewhat. Neither did they count “abundant stacks of papers, mail, and magazines, which we deemed impossible to tally with accuracy…”
- If you were doing the study today, you’d get a grad student to walk inside with a SLR or 4K video camera and try to use machine vision to classify everything. If it worked well, you could identify every visible book, album, picture, and even do stuff like estimate the total mass and volume of objects. It’d make for a good cross-departmental research project.
- The authors spend a little too long talking about just how much work the project took, which I don’t doubt but probably doesn’t warrant mentioning so many times. We already bought the book!
If you’re wondering how the researchers selected the 32 houses, this book won’t tell you. I assume the process is detailed in one of the original research papers, but it’s surprising they don’t include it here.
General & Storage
- Americans own way more shit than I ever imagined. No wonder you’re all in debt.
- A lovely turn of phrase: the US is the “most materially rich society in global history”.
- At the time of writing, the US had 3.1% of world’s children, but 40% of the spending on toys.
One parent: “The closet is extremely unutilised because we usually can’t get to it.”
- “Cars have been banished from 75% of garages to make way for rejected furniture and cascading bins and boxes of mostly forgotten household goods.” The authors estimate that 90% of the total square footage of garages in Los Angeles is used for storage.
Kitchens & Food
- “The typical Los Angeles refrigerator front panel is host to a mean of 52 objects.”
- Making dinners with “mostly” convenience foods is only about 10% (or 5 minutes) faster than dinners that use mostly raw ingredients. Measured differently, convenience foods involve 26 minutes of “hands on” preparation time, versus 38 min for raw foods (excluding any oven/microwave time). A 12 minute different in preparation time isn’t as small a margin as the authors make it out to be, especially for busy and tired parents, but they do point out that convenience foods reduce complexity and shopping/planning time.
- 14% of meals were from take out!
- “Stockpiling is an efficient foraging strategy for parents who want to minimise the number of times they have round up young children…”
Everything Else
- No-one uses their back yards.
- Most of the houses are single storey, including the big ones.
- I would love to see a longitudinal study to observed the effects of the recession and the impact of smartphones and tablets on the total material load inside US households.
- Toilets have been unchanged in form for many decades. I note that out of all the rich tech companies I have visited over the years, only Google X had those fancy Japanese toilet/bidets.
- This has not aged well: “At no point during tens of thousands of years of human history have people been as deeply engaged with nonessential technologies as we are today. Ownership of devices associated with entertainment and mobile communication has escalated from fad to addiction.” I should add that the edition I read was published in June 2017, long after it had become apparent that computers cannot be considered “nonessential technologies” that are only good for addictions.
mythyagain's review against another edition
2.0
The moral to the book: In the US, we have way way too much stuff to the extent that our houses are jam-packed with it. This book would have been more interesting if some of the homes featured weren't in Los Angeles.
jensteerswell's review against another edition
5.0
Wow. This is one of the best books I've read all year. And it definitely made me want to go through my basement and throw out as much stuff as possible.
bhan13's review against another edition
4.0
There are also three YouTube videos associated with this book:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmUyTauQBQ4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmUyTauQBQ4
jlmb's review against another edition
2.0
I checked out both this book and it's companion book from the library - both about the same study. I was thinking this book would just be the accompanying photography book to the main book that goes into detail about the study results. Instead, the authors/editors attempted to just re-write the first book, using more photos and less words. Why, I have no idea. There is no point to it.
What they should have done is this. Instead of publishing a few of the floor plans, print all 32 of them. Instead of showing a variety of photo sizes (mainly smaller photos) they should have put one photo per page - especially of the cluttered houses so we could see the images in more detail. Of course, sometimes it would have made more sense to print smaller images. Like why not post an image of each of the 32 fridges? You could fit all of them onto 4 pages. Then show the most messy, least messy and average fridges juxtaposed with their living/family room. The authors tell of a link between a cluttered fridge door and cluttered house. Why not show the reader instead?
Another bone of contention was that the photography book had no images of the few minimalist houses the study viewed. Why not? What exactly do the authors mean by minimal? Why not show us the rooms so we can decide for ourselves? Why not compare and contrast rooms and houses more? During the section on outdoor use, the authors mention only one house used their backyard for more than an hour at a time. I'd like to see their backyard in order to see if the layout or design facilitates that behavior.
Finally, I didn't care for the images of the owners in their houses.I was distracted by them. It made me focus more on the people and less on the surroundings, which is what the photos were meant to show us. That one photo of the mom sitting at a desk with her dirty bare feet propped up, gross. Why show that image? How embarrassing for that woman.
What I mainly got out of this book was that a lot of people have cluttered unappealing houses and no taste. Not bad taste, but the absence of it. I can appreciate someone decorating in a style I don't care for. They own their style, they enjoy it. Maybe art nouveau or southwestern are not styles I like, but I can respect someone who decorates their house in that style. Most people in this book looked like they lived in a thrift store, with no rhyme or reason. Just a bunch of crap that didn't go together. I can recall two images of rooms that looked nice - not my taste but put together. The rest - Lord! It's like the before houses in Clean House with Niecy Nash.
The nosy neighbor in me enjoyed flipping through the book, but it could have been much much better.
What they should have done is this. Instead of publishing a few of the floor plans, print all 32 of them. Instead of showing a variety of photo sizes (mainly smaller photos) they should have put one photo per page - especially of the cluttered houses so we could see the images in more detail. Of course, sometimes it would have made more sense to print smaller images. Like why not post an image of each of the 32 fridges? You could fit all of them onto 4 pages. Then show the most messy, least messy and average fridges juxtaposed with their living/family room. The authors tell of a link between a cluttered fridge door and cluttered house. Why not show the reader instead?
Another bone of contention was that the photography book had no images of the few minimalist houses the study viewed. Why not? What exactly do the authors mean by minimal? Why not show us the rooms so we can decide for ourselves? Why not compare and contrast rooms and houses more? During the section on outdoor use, the authors mention only one house used their backyard for more than an hour at a time. I'd like to see their backyard in order to see if the layout or design facilitates that behavior.
Finally, I didn't care for the images of the owners in their houses.I was distracted by them. It made me focus more on the people and less on the surroundings, which is what the photos were meant to show us. That one photo of the mom sitting at a desk with her dirty bare feet propped up, gross. Why show that image? How embarrassing for that woman.
What I mainly got out of this book was that a lot of people have cluttered unappealing houses and no taste. Not bad taste, but the absence of it. I can appreciate someone decorating in a style I don't care for. They own their style, they enjoy it. Maybe art nouveau or southwestern are not styles I like, but I can respect someone who decorates their house in that style. Most people in this book looked like they lived in a thrift store, with no rhyme or reason. Just a bunch of crap that didn't go together. I can recall two images of rooms that looked nice - not my taste but put together. The rest - Lord! It's like the before houses in Clean House with Niecy Nash.
The nosy neighbor in me enjoyed flipping through the book, but it could have been much much better.
mom22boys's review against another edition
4.0
I thought this was interesting. I wish they would update it since so much has changed since 2012.
kendra0119's review against another edition
3.0
A very interesting examination of the standard family home. I find myself looking over my home in a different light. I found that portions are now outdated. It would be interesting to see this study done again in the next 10 years. 3/5⭐️