Capsule hotels
A friend of mine had some meetings in London a few weeks ago and went to the new capsule hotel. Apparently it was very nice! It got me thinking about hotels, which are quite expensive endeavours if they're trying to do all the things a hotel "should do"—room service, wakeup calls, wash your clothes for you, what-have-you. Chains are able to provide pared-down versions of these services by operating at scale, but the bad kind of cheap hotels are the ones that are trying to be "full-service" hotels on a shoestring, when they should perhaps be trying to be something that fulfils the primary requirement of "a private bed for the night" without needing to ape the form otherwise and doing a worse job.
I think a lot of things are a bit like this: you're better off embracing the constraints you're working under and trying to be creative than trying to be an ersatz version of something already popular and familiar. Vegan fake meat is not as good as meat and is of way less nutritional value; until they get regulatory approval for that lab-grown meat, you're probably better off trying to work out what the possibilities and affordances of the particular things you've got to work with are—how do I make e.g. tofu delicious—rather than getting something that imitating certain characteristics of the thing you can't have while being worse than it.
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