The MAYA principle of product design

MAYA is one of my favorite design principles for building new products. It's best to start with an example - remember Tesla Model S had a faux grill that made it look like a "normal" car back in a day?

Internal combustion engine cars have a grill in order to supply air into the system. Their grill has holes in it to let the air in.

Tesla's grill was purely non-functional, cosmetic detail.

The fake grill is long gone and cars without the grill (including Teslas) are commonplace nowadays.

I can only speculate about the reasons why the original Tesla had a non-functional grill but I suspect it was the MAYA principle in action.

The MAYA principle was invented by the father of industrial design Raymond Loewy and stands for "most advanced, yet acceptable."

The idea is that new innovative products need to still bear some resemblance to what people are used to. You can't just give humans a vehicle that needs to be charged with electricity every night, that has two trunks, and a half-in-a-trunk third row of seats facing backwards (wtf?) that ALSO looks drastically different from any other car on the road.

So fake grill it is for the sake of making the innovation more bearable to humans.

Some more less obvious examples:

In movie Dune, director Denis Villeneuve wanted 'copters to be out of this world but also kind of similar to helicopters, so viewers could latch onto something familiar that fits into their mental model of the world.

In their music, Nine Inch Nails try combine otherworldly synth sounds with the familiar acoustic instruments.

"When choosing sounds or instrumentation or what timbres we want to use, we are thinking about if there's something that feels electronic or unfamiliar to juxtapose something that feels acoustic and sonically familiar, to avoid everything sounding like science fiction."
- Song Exploder podcast, ep. 124, Dec 6, 2017

MAYA is about making science fiction more acceptable to us, mere mortals struggling to catch up to the ever-increasing pace of technological change in our lives.