“Good design aims to promote those features and values that are timeless. Truly great design embodies them in a way that cannot be forgotten.” – David Bushell
Dear Photograph is a lovely blog where people submit photographs of old photos taken over the original. Browsing through the pictures, my mind started wondering how these nostalgic photos have a connection to design.
Our job as designers is to build meaningful associations and connections between people. Designers achieve experiences of emotional feeling that have a lasting effect; an experience full of purpose and meaning.
Many of the captions under the photos express feelings of lost happiness, hardship and failed love – all emotions that everyone has experienced at some point in their life. The connection between memory and experiences is like a node on a branch on a tree. When our mind loses a connection, these memories and feelings are forgotten and sometimes fade completely. When someone is exposed to an action that requires them to rekindle these memories, the node is re-connected and becomes meaningful.
Design will resonate with people on different levels because of past occurrences and the intensity of these memories. Although we could never facilitate all the possible reactions to a design, we can become more aware of how we respond to certain situations of nostalgia.