Design for nostalgia
The power of the reminiscence bump
Autobiographical memory refers to the memory of one’s personal history. For example, remembering your graduation or the day you met your partner for the first time. Autobiographical memories are not distributed equally across the lifespan. One of the most consistently observed phenomena in autobiographical memory research is the reminiscence bump; a tendency to disproportionally recall autobiographical memories from our adolescence and early adulthood.
This is visually represented in the lifespan retrieval curve is a graph that shows the number of autobiographical memories encoded at various ages during the life span.
This curve contains three different parts:
the period of childhood amnesia, which starts at birth until about the age of five years.
the reminiscence bump (16 to 30 years old).
a period of forgetting from the end of the reminiscence bump to the present time.
The reminiscence bump has been observed on the lifespan retrieval curve in multiple studies and seems to be robust to fundamental differences in sensory experience and cultural differences. Researchers, however, are still not sure what causes it. Is it due to intrinsic qualities of events that happen to us within that time frame (e.g., first love, transition to adulthood)? Is it related to the way our brain encodes/recalls information at that particular age?
A study by Rathbone and colleagues found that the songs we encounter during the period of young adulthood in each generation are those that retain a lasting personal significance. Koppel and Berntsen (2014) described this as a “youth bias” for events and experiences in early adulthood. The effect has been observed in the case of taste for films, tv shows, and the arts, in general. If you’re over 30, have you ever caught yourself complaining about the poor quality of new music/films? Then you’ve experienced the effects of the reminiscence bump! It is what makes you nostalgic for older/simples times…
Since the early 90s nostalgia — “a painful yearning to return home” — has been featured extensively in marketing, advertising, and entertainment media. Nostalgia was first described as a pathological phenomenon (!), but current research views see it as part of the “normal” condition that contains both personal and universal characteristics.
Nostalgia as an emotion contains both pleasant and unpleasant components. This “bittersweet” quality of the emotion is a distinguishing characteristic of nostalgia. It refers back to an earlier period in the individual’s life and draws on biased or selective recall of past experiences. -Havlena & Holak
A study identified that most movie adaptations and remakes occur exactly 20 years after the originals come out. Why is that? Apparently, the memories we form between the ages of 16 and 30 affect us so deeply that when we reach the age at which our generation starts to create the culture — around 40 — media starts resembling the landscape from 20–30 years ago.
One of my favourite examples of this is Netflix’s series “Stranger Things”, a love letter to 80s-90s culture released in 2016. This phenomenon also explains why according to the Guardian “the noughties pop is suddenly cool again”. It’s also one of the reasons Pokémon GO was such a big hit — released about 20 years after the first series!
While songs that were popular in our early 20s seem to have the greatest lasting emotional impact, music that was popular during our parents’ younger days also evokes vivid memories and can also leave a lasting impact causing another, smaller, ‘reminiscence bump’. This means that the songs that shaped our parents are likely to have an effect on us. This pattern of cultural transmission over generations has been referred to as cascading reminiscence bumps and has only been studied in music. It is possible that something similar occurs with other media.
How does this affect design?
When designing for different age groups take into account this “youth bias”. This is an additional thing to consider when creating experiences for users from different generations.
Nostalgia elicits positive feelings, especially when a person is sad or stressed, as the nostalgic item brings back memories of a better time. This is more likely to lead to a positive user experience.
Marketing and advertising have taken advantage of this effect. More specifically, nostalgia seems to be effective when it comes to advertising; according to research advertisements focused on bump, years elicit greater intent to purchase the advertised product than non-bump past and present-focused advertisements.
Nostalgia brings ˝good old” memories and helps many retailers to gain competitive advantage, increase brand perception and maximize profit — Sharma, 2013