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.