Materials Experience Chapter 10. Meaningful Stuff: Toward Longer Lasting Products

This chapter will focus not so much on “what” we do as consumers, but “why” we do it, leading to a broader evolutionary and behavioral discourse on the meaning and role of objects in our lives, drawing into focus the essential relationship between our enduring need for material experiences, and the impacts this has on the natural world. This chapter examines the meaningful proxies, triggers, and metaphors embedded within material experiences, exposing alternative understandings of the immaterial culture underpinning our stuff, and the manifold dialogues we are continually engaged in with the designed objects that touch our lives.