This is why there is something essentially backward looking and reactionary about good design. It recognizes that the main feature being sold is not in the product at all, but in the user’s head: a memory they’d rather recreate than replace.
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This is of course rather dark commentary on us as consumers. We are slaves to the memories that made us feel good in the past. We fear killing the golden goose of an illegible desire that works by examining it too closely. Identity is slavery to your own memories.
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Equally we want to forget, deny, or repress bad experiences while retaining enough memory to avoid recreating them. That’s the logic of aversion/fear products and brands. Details left as homework. It’s just the positive desire story with a flipped sign.
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A growth-and-future oriented mind relates to memories in a very different and unnatural way that requires a kind of learning. You have to remember in ways that don’t let the future be imprisoned by the past.
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It’s not about forgetting. If you forget the past you have no future either. Just a blooming-buzzing-confusion if a present. To be present in the present, the past needs to be an unsentimental memory, and the future as open as it can possibly be. A maximum potential mind state.
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Think of this as the potential energy side of elan vital which is sort of a current/flux. Could you reimagine consumption behaviors to catalyze and enable such states? What does branding look like for such products?
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I think this is the branding associated with the most hackable and designed-for-repairability type products. Where consumption segues towards production via maintenance. There is still sentimental memory but it’s of agency, not pleasure. An improvement.
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This can be even more reactionary of course as in sentimental memories of factory jobs. John Henry memories. Memories of mom’s apple pie might make you a sentimental bore but memories of being a steel-driving man might make you a resentful fundamentalist.
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Is there a way out of this bind? I think so. Still working out the details. Maybe I’ll continue this thread in a year or three if I figure it out.
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That marketing and design appear necessarily reactionary
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Replying to @vgr
A brand needs to be consistent about something. To identify consistency, designers and users need memory. In order to market something, it needs to be presented with concepts that the buyer is familiar with.
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Replying to @strangeattracto @vgr
How do you get from "some amount of consistency and familiarity is required", to "design and marketing must be reactionary"? I think "reactionary" implies more than simple consistency and familiarity - it is something like a cargo cult of the past.
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