Furniture design aimed at reflecting our nostalgic youth

From 83Design, a Japanese design group featured this year in DesignTide Tokyo 2009.

"Our design is not only stimulating, but somewhat nostalgic and heart warming."

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related:

Project: Nostalgia - what are some things you miss or remember? I'm collecting pieces of nostalgia here, anonymously. Would love to have a bit of yours.

"Ketchup was sold as medicine in the 1830's."

It's terribly easy to call something snake oil years after the fact, when all the perceptions have changed.

Or to call the denial of basic rights an embarrasing social injustice years after the fact, when all the perceptions have changed.

Or to realize that all those people saying hard work is the only thing that pays off were right, years after the fact, when all the perceptions have changed.

Or that things like smoking, living wastefully, not recycling, etc. are all ridiculous notions, years after the fact, when all the perceptions have changed.

Or....?

What everyday attitude/perception/belief are you holding right now that is going to be radically different much sooner than you think?

[img via LEARN SOMETHING EVERY DAY]

Why it's impossible to be rational about anything: measuring decision-making factors' potential for rational analysis

One of the problems with making decisions rationally is that it's conceptually impossible. Behavioral economist Dan Ariely highlights this by examining the decision-making process of someone faced with two coffee shops across the street from each other, one featuring handcrafted roasts and the other a standard chain where the coffee is $1.75 cheaper:

What you should do (if you wanted to be rational about it) is consider all of the things that you could buy with that $1.75, now as well as in the future, and decide to buy the expensive coffee only if the difference between the two coffees is more valuable than all of those other possibilities. But of course this computation would take hours, it is incredibly complex, and who even knows all the possible options to consider? [The Psychology of Money and Habits]

If you spend some time thinking on the factors that influence the direction of any decision, what you find is that every factor somewhere on a scale from high potential for rational analysis to low potential for rational analysis. Consider, for example, that a puppy's markings have a very low potential for rational analysis when deciding between one of two puppies to take home.

The problem is that even factors like price that fall relatively high compared to puppy spots are still far from being accurate tools for rational decision making. In this case it's because we can't help but make decisions based on context, relying on a memory that's spotty at best to judge the relative value of any monetary amount at any given time (see: How relativity affects every decision we make: an experiment in making $20K worth more than $20K). This is just one rule of human decision-making among a host of others.

Even if one were to accurately measure the various potentials for rational analysis of every factor at hand (impossible), one would then have to accurately compare factors within the overwhelming matrix of results (also impossible).

Our entire complex of heuristics and cognitive shortcuts exists entirely because being rational is simply far too difficult (see: this list of all the ways you could be completely wrong about everything).

"The most effective product you can sell a parent is guilt."

I'm told that this cover of the New Yorker is inspiring parents to leave their phones home tonight. As Bud Caddell puts it, the most effective product you can sell a parent is guilt.

While it's not something I've had to experience yet, all conversation would indicate that the main draw to having kids seems to be the chance to recreate the 'magic of childhood.'

Of course it's quite like us to look back and romanticize the years of being 'carefree, innocent and full of wonder.' My experience has been that not everyone thinks back on growing up with longing eyes, but for the most part nostalgia is a big part of how we operate.

Project: Nostalgia

Perhaps this is yet another appropriate time for some reflection on Phillip Zimbardo's idea of time-orientation? My experience has certainly been that those who are a little less moved by the magic of childhood are a little more moved by the magic of delayed gratification.

At any rate I feel that thinking of this cover in terms of guilt is spot on. It's a guilt driven by our deeper need to fill our own children with 'perfect' memories of their own. Those of you who are parents: is your phone coming out with you tonight?

We're all natural born liars. It's absolutely what we "want."

I'm quite convinced that the efforts we subconsciously put into fooling ourselves account for a great number of our conscious decisions.

One of my favorite iterations of this plays an active role in those activities that we begin with full gusto and all good intentions, only to find ourselves later struggling to follow through with a project that once seemed so inspiring (read: almost every single idea we have).

We've become so very proficient at telling ourselves that there's something else more exciting, more inspirational, more capable of being what we really want.

So of course the real question to figure out is: "is 'want' really the best way to describe the things that make us truly happy?"