I remember first hearing about it in high school and finding it really fascinating.

It was the subject of a Gilligan's Island episode. That was the first time I heard about it.

Cargo Culting in home design is one of my major pet peeves.

No seriously, stay with me.

Lots of people seem to design their houses around very old fashioned ideas The Home and public and private spaces - the "nice" dining room that get turned into an office, the "living room" shunned for TV on the couch with dinner, the "hall" to greet guests despite that being a apart of average family living for 70 years... like if they buy the right objects and have a furnished room for throwing dinning parties they will just miraculously appear- scratching the aspirational itch that they to like the leisured in magazines have People Over all the time for elegant parties.

It hits a lot of my buttons at once. Is it so hard to think about how you actually use a space and design it from there rather than designing for some fantasy life you don't have?

that NOT being a part. Argh

You get it in web design, too. For example, this Flickr and Zooomr example.

Whelk, I pretty much plan EVERYTHING around some fantasy life I don't have. :)

designing for some fantasy life you don't have?

I guess I don't find this problematic. We've used our dining room once since we moved in two months ago, for Easter dinner, and it was awesome. The rest of the time it makes a fine place to drop mail and bags when you get home from work. We eat in the kitchen or in front of a movie, but the living room is comfortable for that sort of thing. The traditional house layout is where I feel at home. It's not like it doesn't meet my needs - my needs just fit well within that structure. In fact, even though parties are rare-ish, the suitability of our new house for parties (dinner or buffet) was one big reason I liked it a lot. A party is basically a one-time event with several months of very enjoyable fantasy life leading up to it.

Heh. If I designed my home around how I lived my life, the whole damned thing would be a kitchen.

Whelk that is an excellent and most interesting observation, so very very true. Now I can put my finger exactly on what creeps me out about some of these fake houses I have been in.

designing for some fantasy life you don't have?

So I should nix the round bed and ceiling mirrors? Can't I at least pretend a little???

Yes, cargo cults are amazing and it's interesting to try to spot the cargo cults that we are partaking in ourselves.
I can't parse whelks sentences very well but I think I get the general idea.
A lot of the consumer images, ads, womens' and mens' magazines, that we are bombarded with are based on a similar sympathetic magic. If we associate ourselves with those things, buy them, wear them, we'll get all the other perks of these pretty people that are depicted: pretty sexual partners, affluence, social status.
It's easy to feel condescending towards these prehistoric people. But I believe that we all are prone to magical thinking. It's just that we tell ourselves a story that we're rational and critical. We don't notice the water we're swimming in.
Advertisements, television shows, magazines all push these subliminal buttons.
So obnoxious.

Another great word for things that rile me up: Skiamorphae. features that are retained as decoration after they've stopped being functional - like non load-bearing columns eventually becoming just relief etchings of columns. Lots of Skiamorphae in modern life - like the entire idea of dinner (to me anyway). Big meal at the end of the day makes no sense unless you've spent the rest of the day threshing wheat. I'd say small light breakfast, heavier lunch - nap - light dinner ...but the factory time agricultural mode of doing business is still strong as seen as the "right" away to do things even tho most of the time, you're just being paid to take up space - another cargo cult, if you have rows and rows of workers looking busy then magically you'll be efficient just like a factory!

WOW this is off topic. Yah, this is something I've been known to be ranty about.

Well...the entire K-12 school system is Skiamorphic by that standard.

I can understand your vexation, but human beings are not actually very amenable to change. I actually like the continuity of behavior and tradition. change comes rapidly enough with us totally overhauling our lifestyles and customs every 10 years!

I AM FROM 1920 AND WANT YOU ALL TO WEAR JUMPSUITS AND OWN BRIGHT PLASTIC HOUSES!

There, there, dear. Let me program the Nan-O-Mat to assemble you a nice hot dinner.

Skiamorphae

Oh sweet mercy THANK YOU. I blanked on the word skeuomorph and have been trying futilely to remember it for a couple of days. And without the right search terms, zhee googles do nuzzing.

The Whelk, that's pretty dead on how the three homes I had lived in with my parents were laid out, except in house number three we added an actual office. The dining room gets used about four times a year, the living room is basically a glassed-off seating area filled with early 20th century sofas belonging to my grandparents, and the most used rooms of the house are the "great room" (because it's really big, vaulted ceilings and all), the kitchen, and my parents' bed room. Wouldn't it be cool to design a house for actual usage?

Also, Merlin Mann once talked about teenage fashion as being a cargo cult for cool, and that we try to do these things, put on the laceless shoes, the overall shorts, and hope that coolness falls in our laps. I think it comes up in "the Sake Period" episode of You Look Nice Today.