I often feel it when I see handmade things. There's something missing in manufactured stuff. It's information poor.
Each wall is unique in how it settled, each beam is unique in the cuts. The original upstairs floor was beautiful as it was hundreds of solid beams of wood 30 feet long, sadly most of it had been affected by wood worm on the surface ( everything had been hit by wood worms on the surface but miraculously the density of the oak or something seemed to keep them out of the core).
While I like the convenience of manufactured products, they all lack the heart and soul that's held in a handmade product. Often they seem to be lacking in quality too, possibly due to the fact that it's the materials not the labor that now costs the most.
A few years ago I took a class on timberframing ... and part of the class was building a timber frame house.
There's a family that - RIGHT NOW - is sitting, eating, and sleeping feet away from beams that I hand planed and joints that I layed out, cut, and chiseled.
That's a pretty cool feeling.
There are also a handful of friends and family members who have peppermills and salad bowls in their kitchen, that they use every day, that I made on my lathe.
I'm a big fan of making stuff with your own hands. (I even took today off from work so that I could sharpen some of my bowl gouges and work on some projects in the shop).
I recommend that folks give it a shot.
(And now, the obligatory plug - although I swear that I didn't plan it when I started this post! - if you're thinking of picking up a craft and don't know where to start, check out my startup http://smartflix.com )
One reason I prefer manufactured things to handmade things is that the manufactured ones seem "right" in a way that the handmade ones never really do. When I make something by hand, it's never really done, because I can always see imperfections and problems. When something is made by machine, even the imperfections and problems seem like part of it, rather than mistakes, because the machine (ideally) does the same thing every time. It appeals to my sense of completion.
Another reason to prefer manufactured things to handmade (or custom) things is precisely that there's less information associated. It's more relaxing -- less cluttered, in the same sense as the Stuff essay ( http://www.paulgraham.com/stuff.html ).
Conceptually though you could take any old patch of land and build a log cabin with the same functionality and general feel of nature (first one that came up on google: http://www.lincolnlogs.com/askabe.html)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yurt
There are actually several companies building modern yurts. It's one of those fleeting thoughts of escapism I often have that is about buying some land and putting a yurt on it.
Well applied HDR[1] does that to photography.
The house looks organic. Like it has been grown instead of built. Gaudi's buildings have the same style. I think there is a lot of appeal in the organic style, it's a pity it's so rare.
The computational properties of style are explored in Douglas Hofstadter's book "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies" (I recommend it to any hacker interested in aesthetics or cognitive science, but it is not an easy read):
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465024750?ie=UTF8&tag=...
Interestingly, computers can eventually make an assembly line produce unique stylish (organic or otherwise) things. Fractal images are, after all, beautiful, even being totally regular. Certain amount of randomness can do wonders.
Of course computers are similarly supposed to enable mass customization for physical things which is probably more important economically, and it hasn't happened yet.
I think it's meaning we crave, and if we can get it with a better signal to noise ratio, that's more peace of mind for us.
That said, the 'noise' in the shape and texture of natural materials compresses away as generic texture. I think we have evolved to interpret that effortlessly in hardware. The noise of a waterfall can give us peace while the noise of traffic usually has the opposite effect.
More interestingly, we can selectively turn off this mechanism to appreciate natural shapes and textures in their full depth. A tree can be very information rich if we direct our attention to it, while at the same time it's easy to filter it out as 'ok, tree here' without further anxiety. A landscape typically has a lot of information in it, but if we can find a pattern that summarizes its overall shape, its beauty just hits us as something really simple, without need for intense attention or effort in interpretation.
[on applying lossy compression to pg's comments (parent and child of your comment)]