What Starwars and iPhones teach us about pleasant surprises
An alternate title for this could have been… the surprising reason we love some surprises and hate others. But I won’t spoil the surprise. Yet. There are some stories to be told first!
On May 25th 1976 Star Wars hit the big screens. Not all of them, but actually just 32 of them. Not exactly a big bang. Sci-Fi films were not really considered at that point to have a viable audience. How many geeks could there be in the world right? It just wasn’t something that would work for the big screen. Pulp magazines, low cost TV series, sure, but not cinema.
However it did deliver something unexpected. The audience must have felt surprise - and maybe some confusion: after all the intro said that it’s a story set “a long time ago in a galaxy far far away” but it seemed to be set somehow in the… future: it showed a world filled with spaceships, droids, an evil galactic empire, a rebellion scattered in the galaxy, a Death Star…
George Lucas cooked something special together with surprise, something to follow and resolve the confusion. The secret ingredient that makes us love surprises. Following nearly every moment shock, there is something we can relate to, something we see that reminds us of something else, something we have already as reference. After surprise and the tension it generates, he introduced… familiarity.
Star Wars IS set “a long time ago” because it’s the essence of an age old, familiar story. George was obsessed with this idea from Joseph Campbell, the monomyth - the idea that all legends and myths follow the same patterns, a pattern familiar across cultures, times, and, maybe in his mind, galaxies. If you take a close look at A New Hope, you will see it follows the monomyth heroes’ journey almost to the letter.
George sensed that familiarity would make all the surprising elements shine bright in people’s minds, perhaps even unconsciously. In Star Wars you will find the unlikely and reluctant hero - a farmer boy, a call to adventure, a magic mentor, a princess, adventure companions, even a… magic (laser) sword, a dark, evil villain, the hero growing to overcome impossible odds, all ingredients we’ve experienced thousands of times, but all packaged in a surprising way. A surprising AND familiar way.
If you geek out even more… you will see that George stole a lot more things that people were familiar with and packaged them: gritty aesthetics from pulp novels and comics, John Wayne westerns, Flash Gordon, World War 2 airplane battles footage, the Vietnam war and many many many more references. And as much as the surprise and imagination of the Star Wars Universe, it was the familiarity of many of it’s ingredients that pushed it to a global phenomenon instead of a movie shown in 32 theaters.
Resolving the tension of surprise with familiarity, of comfort, is perhaps the biggest magic trick you can pull. If you’re paying attention, you will see it everywhere in mainstream culture, pop songs, technology, history.
The gap between what we can imagine and what is known, between surprise and familiarity is the space we all occupy - and the space we can use to create something new.
So here’s another story on that: by 2007, most of the modern corporate world was familiar with the computers, email and the keyboard. Blackberry at that point was growing for years by combining these three elements into something that was originally both surprising and familiar: a phone with email and… a keyboard instead of numbers pad - playing in a new category for mobile phones - the smartphone.
But on January 7 2007, something more surprising came along. Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone. The design was surprising, it didn’t really look anything like a smartphone - it was more like an expertly designed, minimalist thin, posh soap bar… and most shocking, with no buttons or keyboard to type. Imagine the tension created by this surprise - a smartphone… with no… keyboard? No number buttons?
This conflict persisted UNTIL you turned on the screen. And that’s where all the surprises land with familiarity: you get a sleek keyboard you can use by touching the screen. Still a keyboard… but a surprising one. Familiar. But new. And then even more familiar things: icons like on Mac, iTunes. And one more surprising Trojan horse: by removing the keyboard and replacing it with a big screen, Apple made room for more surprises - called Apps, which would bring capabilities that was previously only reserved for computers… on smartphones. More surprises… to open the door for more familiar things?
Whenever you are creating something, think about these stories and this simple idea: for every surprise you make, after the tension, how do you bring your audience resolve… with familiarity?
If you’re clever and feel like experimenting, test this when making birthday surprises. Get 2 presents, one that evokes familiarity to your birthday girl… and one that you know doesn’t. Which one lands better? Maybe this explains the difference of the big smiles that go with “I can’t believe you know me so well” or just getting an awkward “thank you”. Maybe.