Nostalgia As A Design Strategy In A Facebook Campaign To Revitalise A South African Baking Tradition

Abstract

In general, contemporary Afrikaner women are no longer in the position to spend a lot of time preparing food. They are tasked with managing every day challenges such as work, family and financial responsibilities and the subsequent impact these responsibilities have on activities seemingly of lesser priority, such as the act of baking. This has resulted in the decline of mother-daughter culinary interaction as a form of intergenerational knowledge sharing and the potential loss of the art of Afrikaner baking. In an attempt to address the speculative decline and loss the researcher, as part of the Afrikaner community and as Graphic Designer, aimed to design a nostalgia-driven visual campaign framework that that could be used to re-introduce traditional Afrikaner baking traditions by using imagery that, based on the data, contains nostalgic triggers to elicit a positive response from the viewer. The study followed a qualitative research approach that was made up out of three stages. Stage 1 involved reviewing existing literature on Afrikaner food-related traditions as well as that on nostalgia seeing as a thorough understanding thereof was necessary in order to proceed onto stage 2. Stage 2 involved the gathering of data by developing a closed Facebook page consisting of willing participants. Participants were engaged by asking nostalgia and food-related questions (pertaining in particular to baked goods and the contexts of their making and consumption) based on knowledge gained from the existing literature gathered during stage one. During stage 3 the participant responses were analysed and used in conjunction with the researcher’s knowledge, personal experience (as baker and Graphic Designer) and fondness regarding traditional Afrikaner baking in developing framework consisting of nostalgia-based visual/verbal designs. The researcher made use of triangulation as each of the above mentioned stages interacted and affected the other during the process that led to the envisioned research output – a visual campaign framework. The findings from the research indicate the overwhelming presence of sense of community or cultural nostalgia dynamics, which, in turn drove the design decisions, based on themes of motherliness and support, common and shared goals, and strong connections to nature and heritage. From a visual design point of view, the findings suggest strong use of earthy (and political) colour, encompassing or enclosing line usage, and perhaps most surprisingly, the use of a traditional, non-baking image of the everyday doily. The doily became a metaphor for interconnectedness, community of women and the act of baking.