What makes a product cool?

What makes a product cool? - Some things just have it and some don't. We can all take a glance at a product and almost like an instinct decide if it is cool or not. Much of what makes cool is an illusion, a contextual decision we make based on what we feel is currently cool and what kind of cool we personally identify with.

What makes a product cool?

Corporations invest a huge amount of time and money studying trends and working out what is going to be perceived as cool. If 5" thick solid metal blocks were thought to be something people would think of as cool then the iPads of today may well have looked like that. You just need to peak back to the crazy 1980s to know that cool changes dramatically although saying that a large proportion of hip youngsters have now brought elements of the 80s back and decided they are now cool again. It's a hard thing to nail down.

Form and function

The two overriding factors are generally how the thing looks, which is ever changing things and how it functions which could be seen as a constant. It's a constant in the fact that a cool product will usually be one that fills a need or does something that nothing else can do. An iPad is cool because you can do all the basic things of a previously much larger device. You need no additional equipment such as  a mouse and it's read to use i seconds. The form works because it is streamlined and fits in any bag. Apple have rewritten the book on cool in many ways in recent years and other companies base much of what they release on how Apple's current line of products look.

The function does not always have to be a need though. That can be attested to with items that litter shops like Urban Outfitters. They sell many retro-replica's and the function in that aspect is that these things can do something that old things used to do. An example being the low-grade copies of Russian communist cameras. These film cameras have red hues on the images and burned edges plus barely focus. In aspects of quality they are horrible but they are cool because they replicate something interesting of the past. Of course things like Instagram manage to use modern devices to produce the same thing, now that is a hybrid of cool!

Demand is also another aspect of cool. If someone you think is cool has something then their cool passes onto that thing. They could like drinking a cheap supermarket wine because it's cheap and it doesn't make them sick. All their friends who look up at them may well start doing the same thing thinking it is a cool idea. That product gets caught in a wave and could become cool. This has already happened with Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, a cheap beer that is drinkable and is now a hipster favorite.

I can't nail what is cool but I like to think it's more function heavy for me. Of course like anyone I like a bit of Retro and reminding of things I loved as a kid. If I saw a Goonies T-shirt I would think that was cool, a homage is always cool!

What do you think makes things and products cool?