I closed on a house once on April Fools day. It scared and excited me simultaneously. I was young enough to be afraid of the ball and chain, but mature enough to also understand the benefits. I sat in my car that afternoon, starring at those silver keys as they glimmered onto my windshield. I had a feeling of not knowing what was to come but trusting it. Solidifying that trust it in the form of keys, a wad of money, and a couple thousand signatures.

Deja Vu by You is centered around the idea of trust. We’re proposing that you interact with your future. And as we have found from studiomates’ feedback, that is not such an easy proposition. It’s about writing something that you’ll want to hear in the future or something that you won’t want to hear and trusting that you can handle it. Through the twelve entries we received today I saw that trust embedded in tone and framing. Everything from my brother confidently telling himself to “take a good look at that beautiful family you have” or an anonymous woman in California telling herself that although times are hard for her now - that she had to remember all the loving friends and family that surrounds her. Shuffling through the entries all I can think is how honored I am to provide people with these moments, both now and in the future.

There are many paths from here. The product could become feature rich, we can automate more kinds of printed reminders. We’ve floated the idea of birthday card scheduling. We could do the same for events like anniversaries and such… For me though, the idea is centered around what I like to call maternal interaction design. I am more interested in helping people create an experience for themselves and fostering that into something they will find more meaningful. Someone’s always going to be automating a process that people don’t want to do with any product, but I don’t think of this as much of a product. I think of this as an experiment in user generated nostalgia; hence the name: Deja Vu by You.