Latrines and Anti-Nostalgia

Check out this blog from an IDEO engineer who is taking a sabbatical to design better latrines for people in rural Cambodia. He meticulously documents the entire design process from the ethnography all the way to the brainstorming session with the locals.

An interesting bit in their research was that some people hated dry pit latrines because that's what they used during the Pol Pot regime. Now this was really interesting because I think this is something that slips us when we think about our relationships to objects and certain behaviors - the historical context around them. Now, I understand that comes in the form of nostalgia, but that's related to positive emotions. This is like "anti-nostalgia."

Anti-nostalgia seems to occur from shared catastrophic events or else they would be too varied to study as a group. Looking at recent America history some of those events can be Hurricane Katrina, 9-11 and the Wall Street Fallout and the scars are pretty obvious. But what I'm wondering is what are the not so obvious scars? Hurricane Katrina for example, it's obvious their trust in the government has waned considerably. But say during that time, did they develop an affinity or hatred for any product or process?

It might as well be a rhetorical question as I can't give an answer. But I think this gives us another wrinkle to try to capture when thinking about people and how they relate to things.

You can download a report of the research here.