What makes something cool?
Like a vintage car, or a classic product,
or an iconic design?
You might say, who knows.
There’s just something to them.
This thing is totally subjective.
But all of those designs you just saw
were actually from the same guy -- Raymond Loewy.
And once you understand his theory of
what makes things cool, you’ll see it everywhere.
Raymond Loewy was an industrial engineer
who did more than maybe any other person to shape
the look of America in the 20th century.
His designs are everywhere:
logos, trains, buses, kitchens,
even outer space.
Loewy had a universal theory of cool:
“Most Advanced Yet Acceptable”— or MAYA.
People want to be trendy, but they don’t
want to be weird.
Loewy’s trick was this:
to sell something surprising, make it familiar.
To sell something familiar, make it surprising.
How does this work in practice?
In 1932, Raymond Loewy presented a train design
to Pennsylvania Railroad.
His big idea was a single, sleek shell for the train
the shape of a long bullet.
But his initial design was met with great skepticism,
so he decided to introduce the idea in stages.
His came back with a version that was
only slightly more advanced than
Thomas the Tank Engine.
But his next design was more advanced,
and then more advanced...
until he finally persuaded the train executives
that his original, advanced version was acceptable.
This is the MAYA method.
He made the surprising feel familiar.
There’s scientific evidence to back up these claims.
One of the sturdiest findings in psychological history
is known as the “mere-exposure” effect.
In the 1960s, the psychologist Robert Zajonc
conducted an experiment where he
showed subjects nonsense words,
random shapes, and Chinese characters,
and asked participants to pick their favorites.
The subjects consistently chose the shapes and words
that they'd seen the most.
Exposure leads to familiarity
and familiarity leads to subconscious preference.
There’s even an explanation from
evolutionary psychology:
If you're a hunter/gatherer trawling a Savannah of Africa
and you see a plant or an animal that you recognize,
that's a good sign that it hasn't killed you …
at least not yet.
So we have the “acceptable” part of
Raymond Loewy’s theory -- that people naturally
gravitate towards familiarity.
But what about the “advanced” aspect?
There is another powerful idea in psychology
called habituation.
That means, people get tired of
having to see the same thing over and over again,
like a vampire movie.
The power of familiarity fails
when people feel like they are being
forced to confront it.
Like having to hear that Ed Sheeran song
for the one-thousandth time.
No!
And for that reason, the power of familiarity
seems to be strongest when a person
is least expecting it.
A case study is Spotify’s Discover Weekly feature.
Spotify delivers a personalized playlist
of 30 new songs every Monday to its users.
Initially, the feature was supposed to include
entirely new music by new artists.
A bug in the algorithm accidentally let through
songs that users had already heard before.
So, engineers fixed the bug.
And to their astonishment, engagement with the feature collapsed.
They realized that people trusted new songs
when they recognized old ones.
To enjoy the surprising music,
they needed a dash of the familiar.
Raymond Loewy understood combining
the new and the old intuitively.
One of his last assignments was to help NASA design
the interior of one of it's first space stations:
Sky Lab.
He added creature comforts, like a shower
and a dining room table.
But his most ingenious idea was to
add a small window.
A viewing portal of planet Earth.
You have surely seen this viewing portal --
it’s in almost every movie about astronauts and
space.
It’s the perfect manifestation of MAYA:
a window to a new world can also show you home.
This is "You Are Here", a new video series about
the science of everyday life.
Tell us what you think in the comments.
I'm Derek Thompson, thank you for watching.