“Our theories tell us stories about the objects of our lives. As we begin to live with objects that challenge the boundaries between the born and the created and between humans and everything else, we will need to tell ourselves different stories. . .”
TC Record articles only stay freely accessible for a week or so. Up for now is a book review by Paul Duncum, of the new “Evocative Objects: Things We Think With” edited by Sherry Turkle.
Combining thought with feeling, Turkle argues that we think with the objects we love and love the objects with which we think.
She and her authors variously show the value of objects as “active life presences”, how they are able to act as catalysts for self-creation, how they connect the intellect with the gut, and how we often feel at one with objects. People, including adults, even talk to soft toys as if they were persons.
. . . everyone will be delighted by her and her authors’ many striking and often poignant examples. . . Favorites of mine include slime mold as a way to think about dynamic systems, the suitcase that evoked the author’s relationship with her grandmother, the healing power of a cookie, and how a brooch can evoke a complex, family narrative going back generations that involved the Nazis and Jews, the immigrant experience, and unresolved mother and daughter relations.
This put me in mind of a book I’ve raved about and brought into wildly divergent discussions before, called “Emotional Design: why we love or hate everyday things” in which computer science and psychology professor Donald A. Norman details for us why and how we experience objects emotionally, for good or ill. (Usually without realizing or acknowledging we do it, much less actually thinking about it.)
From Booklist by Gilbert Taylor:
. . . Norman’s analysis of people’s emotional reactions to material objects is a delightful process, replete with surprises for readers who have rarely paused to consider why they like or loathe their belongings. He breaks down emotional reactions into three parts. . . asserting that “a successful design has to excel at all levels.”
. . . With household robots on the horizon, Norman implores designers to redeem their mistakes in designing personal computers. His readers will take away insights galore about why shoppers say, “I want that.”
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