Nostalgia Old

Nostalgia Old

Nostalgia and the Wisdom of the Late Adapter

Even though I work every day at a product design firm, I know there's more to life than just television screens, insanely elaborate booths, and strange sounding products -- not that's there's anything wrong with that. And, while we're mindful of all the strong criticism of the event coming from a green perspective, that's not what we're talking about today.

In our line of work, we are not ones ones to stand athwart innovation and yell "stop!," or even "slow down!" What we are saying is that, with all the changes and new devices coming across the transom, it's useful to consider why so many people are nostalgic for older technology and hesitant to embrace the newfangled. Richard Ziade's online article, "Looking Forward to the Past: The Longing For And Inevitable Return Of The Analog Experience" and his thoughtful closing words got us thinking. To wit:

"We should be wary of what we assume to be conveniences that people want and at the costs of providing them. It turns out that making the cake from scratch is way more fun than tearing open a plastic wrapper because there are good things to take away from that experience. As we define our value and design around it, we should be as sensitive to what people don't want as to what we're certain they do want. It serves us well to respect that delicate balance."

Some of us (well, the guy actually writing this post) got even more thoughtful when Ziade commented parenthetically that the post was written on a steampunk keyboard -- a new idea to writer guy but one long in coming. Basically Jake von Slatt of Steampunk Workship has spent hours stripping away the usual sleek trappings of a computer keyboard and replaced them with the supposedly clunkier accoutrements of an antique manual typewriter.

To some, there might be something truly nonsensical about taking considerable trouble and expense to turn an advanced product into a facsimile of a less advanced one -- but then ask any writer, particular one who worked in a newsroom (or, in writer-guy's case, a high school journalism class) and who learned to write on a manual typewriter. There was something about the satisfying clickety-clack of a manual that told the world know that work was getting done. Now, we can type and serenely listen to music in digital stereo, but those those old manual typewriters -- and even those newfangled electric models -- made a music of their own.

No wonder there are writers -- plugged in writers aged well under fifty, it turns out -- who simply prefer writing their drafts on manual typewriters and an entire web business devoted to keeping them supplied. It turns out that, for all the immense convenience and flexibility that computers offer writers, the older technologies offer something that the new one misses out on.

Even scribblers...well, typers, who have longer ago decided they would give up major bodily organs before parting with their computers, retain vestigial links to their long-gone typewriters. As author Jonathon Lethem wrote in a piece surveying writers' preferred computer fonts:

Before computers, I wrote three novels on a typewriter, and there can never be anything but 12-point Courier (double-spaced) forever: I write on an eternal Selectric of the mind. I can even hear the rattle of the metal ball against the sheet of paper, I swear.
Still, the computer offers so many conveniences and new tools to writers that it was all but impossible to resist, even back when clunky old WordStar was the standard. The moment the first word processors came on the scene, enormous numbers of us, eager to ditch the slow inconvenience of correcting ribbons and liquid paper, switched over almost immediately. Loyalty and nostalgia was one thing, but this new technology was just too powerful.

"But not all new technologies are, and that's the rub. That's why most people are waiting out the current home video wars between HD DVD and Blu-Ray. Regular old DVDs are still such a recent advance -- and so much of an improvement over VHS tapes -- that the novelty hasn't really worn off yet and we're still quite pleased. While we might see the improved resolution of the new technology, we're not going to go to any excessive expense or inconvenience only to find we've saddled ourselves with obsolete technology when we're perfectly happy with the one we've got already."

So it is with newfangled cell phones -- a lot of us are still getting used to the very concept of a phone not using a land line and and don't see much appeal in watching movies on it (way, way, way too small), or texting (what's wrong with old-fashioned e-mail?), or the like. Many do, of course, but the point is that not all consumers think the same and there are vast audiences out there that designers and engineers may not be properly addressing.

Don't call them luddites, call them deliberate. To get them, you're going to have come up with a product that truly make sense, that's all.

About the Author

Bob Westal represents Nectar, an award winning product development consultancy and industrial design firm helping clients create products that connect to their users and expand their markets. For more information, please visit us at http://www.nectardesign.com

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