“In the Age of Sameness, questions about whether you are creative, or how you can become more creative, can no longer guide us. The far more pressing question is whether the conditions for human creativity still exist.”
— from The Age of Sameness
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Book Sales
The book is now available on Amazon worldwide. (Distribution and sales in Turkey is managed by GEDS)
Why This Book, Why Now
Sameness has been building throughout modern history. The Industrial Revolution trained us to value efficiency and measurability above all else. Creativity that didn’t serve productivity was dismissed as waste. Over time, global brands, mass production, and results-driven work cultures narrowed both what we make and how we value it.
The internet then compressed culture further. Memes, aesthetics, and strategies that once spread slowly now go global in hours. Culture itself became fast, convergent, and optimized for what “works.”
Now AI adds an entirely new layer. For the first time, millions of us use the same systems to think, decide, and create. The internet distributed sameness; AI internalizes it. We are beginning to train our minds to follow the same logic, a phenomenon I call cognitive compression.
This is a cultural and cognitive crisis.
That is why this moment matters. The Age of Sameness is written for exactly this moment: to name the ambient condition sameness and understand how human creativity—as an existential capacity—helps us keep rhythm: to meet what comes without capitulation.
What This Book Offers
This book does not offer a method for becoming more creative. Instead, it examines the conditions under which creativity becomes possible or collapses. It asks a more fundamental question: Do the conditions for creativity still exist?
It introduces sameness as an experiential condition that emerges when variation can no longer be integrated into continuous experience. Drawing on psychology, cultural history, and lived observation, the book traces how modern systems—industrial, digital, and now algorithmic—have reshaped the conditions of engagement.
To make this visible, the author reinterpret the Wundt curve as a map of experience. Rather than describing optimal stimulation for performance, it becomes a way to understand when variation can still be integrated into life and when experience collapses into sameness.
The aim is not to reject modern systems but to understand how they shape perception, attention, and creativity. By recognizing these conditions, we may begin to recover rhythm: the ability to respond, adapt, and remain alive within change.
About the Author
Gulay Ozkan is an entrepreneur and author. For over two decades, through her company GEDS Strategic Design Consultancy, her professional practice has focused on human experience under digital systems
through the lens of design.
Gulay attended Singularity University’s GSP13 program at NASA Ames and has received accolades such as the DMI 2019 Design Value Awards, Fast Company’s Top 100 Female Founders, and the Microsoft 2020 Woman Leader Making a Difference Award.
She authored Design Leadership: Past, Present, and Future and serves as a curator, moderator and advisory board member at SXSW for AI, 2050, space, and design tracks since 2019.
Her writing explores how contemporary technologies, markets, and culture shape the conditions for human creativity, and has been published in multiple languages across four continents. Based in Istanbul, she works internationally.
Press Coverage
DEFI La Mode de France: La « sameness » dans la mode : rencontre avec la designer et chercheuse Gulay Ozkan à SXSW 2026, April 2026
B9 Brazil: A era da mesmice: a criatividade sitiada, March 2926
Events
Book Launch: SXSW 2026 Book Reading Session, 11:30 p.m., March 15th, 2026, Hilton Downtown, Austin, USA
Book Signing: SXSW 2026 Book Signing Session, 12:45 p.m., March 15th, 2026, Hilton Downtown, Austin, USA
Book Sales
The book is now available on Amazon worldwide.
Book available from March 13, 2026 at the SXSW Bookstore (run by BookPeople) – SOLD OUT
Distribution and sales in Turkey is managed by GEDS
“Sameness appears across many different domains— work, culture, identity, cities, relationships. This is not a stylistic issue. It is a structural one. This is the creativity crisis.”
— from The Age of Sameness