Such settings tune us affectively to our surroundings, help us to maintain preferable states of arousal and alertness, and ultimately permit us to behave adaptively.
In a generic design where our transactions with our surroundings are
mediated entirely artificially using embedded intelligence and carefully
designed interfaces that can simulate the environmental contingencies
for which we evolved, it might be possible for us to get everything
exactly right and to produce the perfect human environment. But given
the complexities that we would need to understand and to model in
order to do so, it seems more likely that we will get enough things wrong
so we will be worse off than ever before. Furthermore, producing the
perfect, adaptive environment out of bits and pixels would also seem
to presuppose the oversight of an entirely benevolent and unbiased set
of powers. Given what we know of the artful use of design psychology by those with vested interests to influence our behavior to increase
their own profit, up to and including the production of damaging and
self-destructive behaviors akin to those seen in people with substance
addictions, this supposition of benevolence would seem to be naïve.
As much as we might like to have it be otherwise, it seems that boredom is an inevitable element of modern life. One might even argue
that some degree of boredom is healthy. When the external world
fails to engage our attention, we can turn inward and focus on inner,
mental landscapes. Boredom, it has sometimes been argued, leads us
toward creativity as we use our native wit and intelligence to hack boring environments to create interest. But streetscapes and buildings
designed and built to generic functional requirements and ignoring the
inbuilt human need for sensory variety—a tempting and economical
proposition when so much of our mental stimulation comes from the
virtual and the electronic—cuts against the grain of ancient evolutionary impulses for novelty and sensation and will not likely lead to comfort, happiness, or optimal functionality for future human populations.