The Ugly Carpets of Vegas are Hideously Clever Social Engineering at Work [Imagecache]

Something this horrific can’t possibly be an accident. I mean, it takes genius to return up with something so offensive to the eye. Sure enough, the crazily appalling carpets that adorn Vegas casinos are designed to keep you gambling.

Like some kind of vile afterbirth after a meeting of the 1990s and an insane asylum patient, casino carpets seem to violate every design rule established over, say, the past several thousand years. An art student would probably burst into flames the moment they walked in. But intrepid photographer Chris Maluszynski somehow managed to stare (and beautifully photograph) a chain of shocking casino floors without giving himself a brain hemorrhage, and is showing off his ends in a new exhibition, Las Vegas Carpets. Maluszynski concludes that the carpeting isn’t just aesthetic torture, but, similar to the shortcoming of windows and clocks (and the constant barrage of free booze), is a canny design choice-portion of what ” defines Vegas as a gambling city.”

Dave Schwartz, Director of the heart for Gaming Research (!) at the University of Nevada Las Vegas echoes this observation, claiming that ” ” casino carpet is called an exercise in deliberate bad taste that somehow encourages people to gamble.” Schwartz considers the likelihood that the symbolism incorporated into every ghastly square foot encourages us to piss away money on a subconscious level, but really, the trick doesn’t seem anywhere so subtle to us. With floors that appear as if that, who would ever wish to let their eyes wander away the games? [ Wired via Core77 ]

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This post is tagged: clever, Engineering, Hideously, ugly, work