HOMI is getting ready to represent the lifestyle sector in terms of personal and living spaces. A world to be explored to understand what features the items must have to be attractive to consumers. We anticipate some of the current ones, while also trying to look beyond them with the help of sociosemiotician Laura Rolle.

Adding: a perennial trend

Remember the movie “The Shop Around the Corner”? The original dates back to 1940 and has the unmistakable touch of director Ernst Lubitsch. The would-be saleswoman Klara manages to sell an ordinary candy box because it has a music box. A simple mechanism that nevertheless turns a common item into an experiential one to stimulate the senses and even create awareness.

So what is that experience? According to the consumer behaviour theory, that experience can be classified into 6 macro-ones: sensory, emotional, cognitive, pragmatic, lifestyle, relational or social experience.

There is a simple observation to be made: to charm and win a person's preference, any product must have a 'little something extra' that touches one’s feelings. Klara, the would-be shop assistant, offers the candy box to a lady warning her that the sound of the music box, when she opens it, will be an admonition to stick to the diet she has imposed on herself. The purchase was successfully completed because it met a felt need. Consumer psychology studies confirm this.

So what would be added to a sensory experience? Everything that touches the five senses. Soft items with organic shapes, perfect for relaxing and reassuring, surfaces to touch to perceive sinuosity, vivid and bright colours to boost energy, olfactory nuances that characterise a product and diffuse a fragrance in the environment, like a beneficial aura.

For the sounds that identify a product, there are extraordinary studies on the acoustics of the materials, the timbre of wood, the rustle of silk, but also solutions that accompany the dry clack of a clasp, or a soft sound that fades immediately. Light plays a scenic role. It is not only that of luminous items such as lamps, but also that reflected and captured by the surfaces that refract it. Rays of light that are cheerful sparks.

Experience is a feeling, a perception, and emotions are the most powerful ingredients one can add to a product.

What stimulates emotions? Dozens of different types of positive, negative, neutral emotions have been identified in psychology. We have chosen three extremely relevant ones: joy, fun, and nostalgia. Products that address these primary emotions stimulates areas of the brain that are crucial to trigger positive emotions that bind the person to the object. So nostalgia is the winning ingredient of vintage, the one that makes it alive and an indispensable reassuring presence. The object that seems like a family keepsake stimulates nostalgia even when it is reinterpreted in a contemporary key, without the dust of time, purified and brought up to date in a furnishing accessory that becomes a memory, a source of dreams about an imaginary past.

Fun, playful, entertaining, anti-boredom: these are the qualities of tableware that, although perfectly functional and practical in their use, must be able to bring a smile to one's face, to stimulate laughter, but also be effective in achieving the original purpose. The most sought-after emotion? Definitely joy! It can be interpreted in various ways and levels. The textile area creatively addresses this feeling. The house becomes a cosy cocoon, a cocoon for intimate joy. Green furnishings provide sun-filled joy. Would you like a moment of hilarious joy? The one of the good mood conveyed by things done well with one's own hands, a bricolage between the art and craftsmanship, with the addition of one's own sense of aesthetics.

"One of the Deep Trends we identify," explains Laura Rolle, co-founder of BlueEggs, a company whose Deep Trends help managers design innovation for brands, products, and communication strategies, “has to do with the concept of durability, and we have defined it as 'ad aeternum'. Products must be possible to repair and manufacturers must include the possibility of certain parts being replaced, in the logic of repair but also transformation. When an item has exhausted its primary function, it can be modified to perform a different role in a different space. We talk a lot about commitment to sustainability, but then why not choose products that respond to the concept of durability? Longevity, the possibility of re-fitting, repairing and re-interpreting a product must guide manufacturers' choices.

The “ego” in all things

Customisation has been another constant for a few years now thanks to sophisticated technical solutions that are simple to offer to consumers looking for uniqueness. Reaffirming one's personality, making one's taste, one's preferences visible is a demand that can be met quickly and easily. So if the past one’s initials embroidered on a tablecloth were the only possible customisation, today digital printing machines, embroidery machines, those that adorn a t-shirt or even a vase with shiny sequins or studs are within everyone's reach. We are already going beyond what we can call meta-utopia. Smartphones are the tool that allows adventures to be experienced by framing an evolved qr-code, accessing augmented reality, the virtual animation that projects an object into the meta-space. While waiting for more affordable visors to enter the metaverse, one can start with augmented reality, which, once a story has been told can be built to meet the customer's specifications.

The wow detonator

What happens with a surprise effect? The heart rate increases and breathing becomes shallower, a physical sensation that goes hand in hand with what happens to the brain. To achieve a wow effect there are many gimmicks, the surprising and the unexpected, however, may not achieve the desired result if one does not first succeed in stimulating curiosity and the imagination and above all triggering the desire to be co-authors of a process. The wow effect is everything that exceeds expectations, so if unboxing is the wow effect of e-commerce, it takes a lot more to surprise when it comes to well-known and long-used products, merchandise that is part of the landscape that decorates the home.

Technology puts in place exuberant solutions, open the fridge and the light is that of the aurora borealis, a few seconds of illusion of being at the North Pole. A serotonin effect is achieved when a pillow massages one’s shoulders. The warmth of the hand changes the colour of the bottle as you pour the sparkling wine. The bell at the door lights up the foyer to the house with luminous phantasmagoria when it recognises a guest. Wonder, however, must be given stability otherwise it is no longer surprising. Thus, technology allows to on/off meaning switching the device on and off.

“The products of today and tomorrow,” Laura Rolle says, “must be light, meaning that they must have an intangible counterpart. With BlueEggs, we define this model as evanescent: the product defined in its concrete volume will have to talk with the digital one; the design will have to envisage a dimension of dematerialisation, almost metaphysical, as the Metaverse shows. We are now in a revolutionary phase of continuous blending between online and offline, between natural and artificial, between past, present and future, between reality and fiction, between visible and invisible”.

From social distance to social intimacy

Social interactions and close ties flowing seamlessly between online and offline. Community is the new paradigm and is built around a theme. Embroidering, painting, reinventing furniture and objects. Old and new arts shared in real and virtual groups. Collective creativity that stimulates the pleasure of thinking and doing together. Tool sets, toolboxes full of tools, professional tools that are increasingly high-performance and specialised, also suitable for female hands are back in the limelight. Building is a truly feminine experience of creativity. Then you put it all online, share it on social platforms and start again with a new project that you thought up together.

"The keywords," explains Laura Rolle, "are augmented community, coexistence, interdependence, solidarity connections, and selective society. We must go beyond the targets. With ‘bubble community' we mean looking at temporary communities, designing temporary collections: think of new mothers buying a product linked to a specific moment in life. After that, the product can be put back into circulation, shared with neighbourhood communities in a spirit of true sustainability.”