Product Design
Nostalgia by design
How successful companies embody nostalgia into their product design and philosophy.
Remember the days of the old schoolyard
We used to laugh a lot, oh don’t you?
Remember the days of the old schoolyard
When we had imaginings and we had
All kinds of things and we laughed
And needed love, yes, I do
Oh and I remember you
Remember the Days / Cat Stevens
Nostalgia is a powerful emotion. We all have our moments of reflecting fondly on the past, and how things used to be so much better (or at the minimum ‘simpler’). Wikipedia defines it as a sentiment associated with a yearning for the past, its personalities, possibilities, and events, especially the “good old days” or a “warm childhood”.
Interestingly enough, that positive association wasn’t always the definition of Nostalgia. In fact, its origins are rooted in melancholy and malady. Coined in the 17th century, it used to describe a feeling of “homesickness” exhibited by European mercenaries that were deployed far away from home.
The word itself is a a fusion of two Greek words — nostos (homecoming) and algos (pain). At some point, through some modern developments, it has changed its meaning to embrace the positive reflection of past memories and experiences.
Psychologists and neurologists can scientifically map the recollection of pleasant past events with the reward systems of the brain. A certain smell, a certain touch, a song or a book can all trigger metabolic activity and blood flow in several regions of the brain associated with our reward system, which explain the feeling of warmth we may feel to say, the sound of a popular song from the 80s, even for one that we didn’t much like back then.
Nostalgia in Product Design
Once upon a time there was a tavern
Where we used to raise a glass or two
Remember how we laughed away the hours
And dreamed of all the great things we would do
Those Were The Days / Mary Hopkin
Given its powerful effect in evoking emotions, product designers have been using nostalgia as a tool and a technique to create attachments to their products. Ryan Hoover, the co-author of Hooked has uncovered this “secret weapon” before in some successful products. While his examples are now somewhat dated, other cases in points are presented to us on a daily basis; just consider Google Photos “Rediscover this day” or Spotify “Year in Review” as two notable examples.
Reminiscence is one way to trigger nostalgia; retro and vintage is another. We tend to look fondly at objects, fashions and certain types of behavior that remind us of a “lost paradise”, something that was swept away by the waves of technology and that to which we urge as a sign to a world that once was simpler and better.
Naturally, to a large extent, this feeling is false and illusionary. There’s nothing objectively better about a telephone booth or a VW beetle, other than that feeling of nostalgia they bring about in the face of whatever detachment modern lives impose on us. That doesn’t mean however, that the impact of our encounters with them is any less real. And so it follows, that recreating such nostalgic experiences in digital products through styling of vintage or modeling of long-gone behaviors can produce positive attachment to a product.
Here are few examples of successful products that have embodied such nostalgic elements in their design or product philosophy:
The image sharing and collection platform, Pinterest, draws its name from the metaphor of the pinboard which every room of every teenager in every American film seem to have. In fact, the association of Pinterest is broader and can be applied to almost every past experience of collecting, whether these are stamps, rocks or newspaper clips. Founder, Ben Silbermann, has had the memory of his childhood bug collection when he went to design the first version of the product.
When Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger pivoted from the Burbn app into what turned to be Instagram, they considered their biggest rival to be Hipstamatic, at the time a highly popular photos sharing app. What made Hipstamatic stand out was its deliberate vintage design and its appeal to photographers, by embodying filters that allowed photos taken on mobile devices to be given a past quality of what still considered to be real photography.
When famous photographer Damon Winter has published professional photography at the NYTimes, using Hipstamatic, it was a vote of confidence to this fusion of the old and the new. Just as powerful was the engagement it drawn from photo enthusiastic all over the world, who embraced the filters feature as a way to give touch to their mobile photos on a wide range of styles, including the “crappy low-quality” but memorable Polaroid days.
Hipstamatic exists to this day, but lacking strong social sharing features it left the battlefield unguarded for Instagram, who snatched their filters feature and made its way to be acquired by Facebook for $1Bn. Unfortunately, along their way of success they seemed to depart of the nostalgic design that contributed to their early days’ attraction.
Suan
Suan.fm, which stands for “Stayed Up All Night” might be a niche compared to the examples above but it’s a great example of the use of nostalgia in product philosophy and design. The website recreates the lost experience of composing a mixtape on a cassette and sharing it with friends. It does it by giving a special care for visual details to the level of mimicking the sloppy handwriting of song names on a design of an old cassette. It also allows you to choose from a set of old cassette designs and customize the end product with eighties’ like doodles and stickers.
And I wish it was the sixties
I wish I could be happy
I wish, I wish
I wish that something would happen
The Bends / Radiohead
Pinterest, Instagram and Suan.fm all aim to drive user engagement by creating a retro or vintage design that evoke those nostalgic feeling to objects and forms of design that connect us to different (and subjectively better) parts of our life.
Flipboard is somewhat different in that it plays less so on the emotional side of things, and instead attempts to digitally recreate a user experience around journalism that has seemed to die with the move to online.
By aggregating news articles from across the internet and reformatting it into a magazine layout, it was one of the first applications designed specifically for the launch of the iPad, but what made it interesting is in the way it molded an old format to a new form factor, making way to the creation of over 30 millions magazines.
Snapchat
Given Snapchat’s target demographic of millennials and Z-gens, its inclusion here might seem dubious at first, but it’s worthwhile to recall its history and original motivation.
Snapchat early success has been attributed to the growing concerns of then social media users, especially young generations, who were afraid that the images they share will “come back to haunt them”. Snapchat’s key feature of “self-destructive” sharing fitted neatly into that space.
In an 2013 interview to The Telegraph, Snapchat’s founder, Even Spiegel, explained how their design and product choices connected with the motivation to bring back a social experience that seemed to be diminishing:
“What Snapchat said was if we try to model conversations as they occur they’re largely ephemeral. We may try to write down and save the really special moments, but by and large, we just try to let everything go. We remember it but we don’t try to save it”
Podcasts
We had joy, we had fun
We had seasons in the sun
But the hills that we climbed
Were just seasons out of time
Seasons in the Sun / Terry Jacks
My last example is not of a specific app but rather a new medium, namely Podcasting. The success and growth of podcasting has been nothing short of phenomenal, with over 1,500,000 shows out there according to a recent stat.
In many ways, the success of podcasts is an antidote to the superfluous and “faceless” popularization of social media, and it’s one of the emerging positive trends toward media that is based more on relations rather than transactions. Noble, but not new. Many characteristics of the podcast resemble in nature the days of the Radio Drama, which was a highly popular form of entertainment at the birth of modern radio of the 20th century until its gradual demise through the 70s. Now it’s making a comeback both as the content of some shows as well as by inspiring the production of podcasts overall.
Our world is changing at an accelerating pace; our biology not as much. This widening gap between what we can achieve technologically and what we can cope with as social animals is likely to create a dissonance in our interfacing with the digital products around us. Nostalgia is one such feeling that can bridge that gap, by bringing a sense of warmth and connection to an otherwise potentially cold and estranged experience. Product designers can use these principles to turn their products not only to objects of desire but also of homecoming.
