The Charm of Memory: Examining Nostalgic Experience From a Design Perspective

Nostalgia, as both a social phenomenon and subjective experience, plays a significant role in product experience, consumer preference and human-product/brand relationships. Despite frequent mention and use, relatively little explicit knowledge of this topic has been generated in relation to design. This paper therefore investigates nostalgic experience from a design perspective. Firstly, it proposes a heuristic model for explaining the underlying process of design-evoked nostalgic experience. Secondly, in order to provide a comprehensive understanding of the experience, it analyses nostalgia from three distinct product experience levels (experience of meaning, aesthetic experience and emotional experience) and highlights the relationship between nostalgic experience and memory retrieval (explicit memory and implicit memory). It then examines the influential factors of nostalgic experience from two perspectives: (1) the user and context; (2) the product and interaction. Finally, nostalgia is placed in a wider context in relation to familiarity and novelty within the overarching research field of “Design and Memory”. The ethical dimension of nostalgia is also addressed