Emotional Design by Donald A. Norman Page A

provides a good example. In the flow state, you become so engrossed and captured by the activity being performed that it is as if you and the activity were one: You are in a trance where the world disappears from consciousness. Time stops. You are only aware of the activity itself. Flow is a motivating, captivating, addictive state. It can arise from transactions with valued things. “Household objects,” say Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton, “facilitate flow experiences in two different ways. On the one hand, by providing a familiar symbolic context they reaffirm the identity of the owner. On the other hand, objects in the household might provide opportunities for flow directly, by engaging the attention of people.”
    Perhaps the objects that are the most intimate and direct are those that we construct ourselves, hence the popularity of home-made crafts, furniture, and art. Similarly, personal photographs, even though they may be technically inferior: blurred, heads cut off, or fingers obscuring the image. Some may have faded, or be torn and
repaired with tape. Their surface appearance is less important than their ability to evoke the memory of particular people and events.
    This point was vividly dramatized for me in 2002 when I walked through the exhibits on display at the San Francisco Airport. This is one of the world’s most interesting museums—especially for people like me who are fascinated by everyday things, by the impact of technology upon people and society. This exhibition, “Miniature Monuments,” was about the role of souvenirs in evoking memory. The show displayed hundreds of miniature monuments, buildings, and other souvenirs. The items were not on display for their artistic quality, but to applaud their sentimental value, for the memories they evoked and, in brief, for their emotional impact upon their owners. The text that accompanied the exhibition described the role of souvenir monuments thusly:
    The marvel of souvenir buildings is that the identical miniature sparks in each of us extravagantly different webs of remembrance.
    While the purpose of all monuments is to cause us to remember, their subjects have a wide range. Great people and important events; wars and their casualties; and the history of Astoria, Oregon, are memorialized in the monuments represented in miniature.
    These souvenirs serve two purposes, though. Even as a copperplated pot metal replica of Lincoln’s Tomb in Springfield, Illinois, causes us to remember the sixteenth president, it also prods recollection of the monument itself. Monuments may remember significant people and events; architectural miniatures remember the monuments.
    The architect Bruce Goff has remarked, “In architecture, there’s the reason you do something, and then there’s the real reason.” With souvenir buildings, despite their ostensible (if purposeless) functions, their real reason remains the provocation of human memory.
    Those of us viewing these miniatures did not necessarily have any emotional attachment to the objects—after all, they weren’t ours; they were collected and displayed by someone else. Still, as I strolled
around, I was most attracted to souvenirs of places I had myself visited, perhaps because they brought back memories of those visits. Had any one been emotionally negative, however, I would have quickly moved past it to escape—not the object but the memories it called forth in me.
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    PHOTOGRAPHS, MORE than almost anything else, have a special emotional appeal: they are personal, they tell stories. The power of personal photography lies in its ability to transport the viewer back in time to some socially relevant event. Personal photographs are mementos, reminders, and social instruments, allowing memories to be shared across time, place, and people. In the year 2000, there were about 200 million cameras in the United States alone, or around two cameras per household;