product design
Nostalgia Brewer
A coffee set that feels like home.
The Problem
This project started from a personal place: my first semester living in the US, far from home in İzmir, Turkey, and struggling with the shift from a sunny, mild climate to Iowa’s. Rather than just sit with the homesickness, I wanted to understand it and turn that understanding into a physical object. Research led me to the concept of nostalgia. That feeling became the design target: not something to numb homesickness, but something to help move through it into nostalgia.
Research
This was grounded in secondary research, reading into the psychology of nostalgia versus homesickness. It’s well established that nostalgia, unlike homesickness, tends to function as a positive and even motivating emotion rather than a painful one, which is what shaped the goal of moving the user from one state to the other rather than just distracting from the feeling.
Homesickness, it turns out, comes from a kind of friction tied to leaving home, something as simple as expectations not lining up with reality. Nostalgia works differently: it's a positive lens on the past rather than sadness about the present. Being grateful that those good days happened, rather than mourning that they're over, fuels the creativity and motivation to handle whatever distress the present moment brings, which is exactly the shift the project was designed around: moving someone from homesickness to nostalgia.
Process
Homesickness tends to worsen in isolation, so I started by mapping where to locate this object, somewhere social, but not so social that it drowns out inner reflection. That pointed toward the kitchen: food is one of the most reliable things that brings people together and gets them thinking of others. From there, I narrowed it to coffee specifically; its aroma, ritual complexity, and strong cultural associations all pointed to socialization and slowing down. Coffee sparks conversation across many cultures, and even when it’s consumed alone, its smell surfaces memory.
The Insight
V60 pour-over coffee requires you to slow down, it can’t be rushed. That slowness creates space to actually sit with feelings rather than push past them, which made it the right vehicle for a nostalgia-triggering ritual rather than just a coffee gadget.
The Solution
Nostalgia Brewer pairs the V60 brewing process with a memory board — a metal grid where the user hangs their own photos. As the user slows down to brew, they’re facing the memory board, drawing them back into meaningful moments and turning the daily coffee ritual into a small, repeatable moment of reflection.
Reflection
This was less about solving a market gap and more about processing something I was actually going through, which made it a different kind of design exercise than the rest of my portfolio. It pushed me to treat an emotional, personal question with the same rigor as a research-backed brief — and it’s a good reminder that not every project needs a business case to be worth doing well.
Let's make what's next.
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© 2027 Pınar Adanır.
Curious & intentional.