Occasionally they are an aesthetic but then again in the US also - see for example The Pawn Shop restaurant in San Francisco (where you bring a token object to be admitted).
Very common example: home kitchens have cabinets, commercial kitchens have shelves and racks. When speed really matters, the cabinet doors need to go.
If people work without things in plain sight, it is because they have committed what is out-of-sight to memory, which is kind of an ongoing burden.
My tool chest is sort of a hybrid - the drawers are sort of an index, and when you open the "screwdrivers" drawer, they are all in plain sight to choose (and return).
I wish more house cabinets had wide shallow drawers to solve other problems this way.
Kitchens still have cabinets. Where are my cluttered websites at?
I don't think every single website needs "speed." Specially when I go to some websites sometimes and they have a 2 megapixel PNG as favicon but a minimalist, border-rounded flat designe Wordpress theme.
https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-differe...
People who say it doesn't are wrong. They have invested time in their "clutter technical debt" to set up systems that lower time and effort.
Like taking the time to figure out where everything goes. And when things stop working, they take the time to revise the system. I think of rush "If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice"
That being said, there is something beautify about the clutter that comes out of Asian cities with their limited space and abundance of people, which allows odd specializations. Though you can fine some of the same beauty in small shops and business in a city like New York, where space is also at a premium.
> By turns reverential and condescending, ideas of Japan’s enlightened design sensibilities swept Western society.
Western colonizers are obsessed with the myth of the noble savage. It’s the exact same treatment Americans gave to natives - oh look how minimal, how simple, how in touch and in tune with nature they are.
Ah yup. The famous noble savage that were still engaging in torture and freaking cannibalism... Weirdly enough that fact is often missing from history books / online discussion.
That temple is a great example of maximalist minimalism. Sure there's great detail, but it's all neatly framed in a simple layout, with a repetitive pattern, etc.
Actually that sums up all the examples. They may be messy in a way, complex, detailed etc, but they're still constrained to simple patterns and layouts (square shelving, etc), so not really maximalism at all, in fact.