The Most Advanced Yet Acceptable Products Win

Principles of balance are as old as time.

For Aristotle, it was the balance between excess and asceticism. For Taoists, it’s the balance between exerting effort and letting go. And for Raymond Loewy, famous for designing products like the Coca-Cola bottle and the S1 locomotive, and often considered the father of industrial design, the balance was between the advanced and the acceptable.

In the early 20th century, to guide the creation of his groundbreaking works, Loewy developed a rule he called MAYA: the most advanced yet acceptable design. 

MAYA dictates that the ideal design sits between solutions that are completely novel and entirely familiar. Be too novel and customers will tune you out. Be too familiar and customers will look right past you. Or, in Loewy’s words, “The adult public’s taste is not necessarily ready to accept the logical solutions to their requirements if the solution implies too vast a departure from what they have been conditioned into accepting as the norm.” 

MAYA is the sweet spot: novel but familiar, advanced yet acceptable. And it can make or break the success of innovations.

To better illustrate MAYA, I’ll highlight hits and misses from three high-profile tech categories: smartphones, wearables, and generative AI. I’ll use these examples to demonstrate how you can apply these principles to your designs, create products that resonate with your target audience, and bridge the gap between innovation and acceptance.