How objects build bridges to meaning

When the iPhone launched in 2007, it was a revelation in how to design technology that felt like a natural extension of the body. By introducing multitouch, they made it simple, responsive, and designed for our hands and fingers instead of the clunky digital interfaces we were used to at the time.

The same was the case with their design of the icons. By using skeuomorphs – icons that resembled their old analogue real-world counterparts, they helped us navigate and bridge the gap between the sleek, digital world and our real-world experiences: The audio recorder looked like an old tape recorder (already a thing of the past in 2007), eBooks were placed on what looked like wooden shelves etc. By doing so, they gave their digital world a sense of familiarity and tactility. They carved out a digital space that felt welcoming and safe, as well as exciting and novel at the same time.

Today, more so than ever, the analog has a certain allure as a countering of our hyperdigital world. It works and creates meaning in different ways than the instant gratification model of the digital, where speed and the readily availability of the consumer’s every desire seem to be the only governing structure. The material qualities of objects contain friction. But this friction can be meaningful and allow for something else to appear. Consider, for example, the ritualistic nature of putting on a vinyl record. It creates a different focus and sense of time than “the Spotify experience.” The materiality of the objects shapes our interactions with them, and thereby they open up for certain types of experiences – they become agentic.

I have long been interested in the idea of using analogue objects (or a semblance of them) to create a bridge to the past or to experiences that have been lost in our modern, digital lives. I have noticed how singer-songwriters like Sufjan Stevens or Matt Berninger from The National use objects in their songwriting to create experiences of something that resides beyond language.

In Sufjan Stevens’ album Carrie and Lowell, he is trying to get a hold of his relationship with his mother, who suffered from depression, schizophrenia, and substance abuse through the songs. She was absent for most of his life before dying in 2012. In the song “Should have known better”, he takes the listener back to the earliest of his childhood to the very image of disappearance:

When I was three/ Three maybe four / She left me at that video store

Unable to determine his age, it is as if the event is the catastrophe before time, the Big Bang, that has set time in motion and cast its shadow over him and his life. As an image, it has cast its “black shroud” over him and his life until now. In other words, the mother’s disappearance happened far too suddenly, incomprehensibly, and before the child had gained a firm grasp of himself as a being. Thus, it is the trauma and the incomprehensible grief that shapes the child: “My black shroud/ holding down my feelings,” “the demon had a hold on me.” Instead of externalizing the grief, it becomes “captain of my feelings.”

For Sufjan Stevens, the song is about rejecting the image of loss that has formed him. It is the “bridge to nowhere”, instead rejoicing in the presence of life:

Don’t back down, concentrate on seeing
The breakers in the bar, the neighbor’s greeting
My brother had a daughter
The beauty that she brings, illumination

But although Sufjan Stevens sings about the beauty of the present and the bridge to the past leading nowhere, he is invoking exactly such a bridge for the listeners by painting an image of loss and disappearance: The video store is a place of non-existence, of something that disappeared long ago. Stevens is playing a double game, making the scene tangible and physical by naming it and giving it a body, yet it is a black hole of disappearance, since the whole thing is no more. He is invoking an image of disappearance, as he does again, just a few lines later:

When I was three, / and free to explore/ I saw her face on the back of the door

He is making her visible, but only as a fleeting figure of disappearance by using real objects like the video store now long gone or the door leading away from him and the listener to create a physicality to the experience of loss and grief, so beautifully evoked in the song.

The National does something similarly remarkable in their song “Eucalyptus” from their 2023 album First Two Pages of Frankenstein. In the song, the band plays out a negotiation of the past.

In a divorce scene, two people’s differing appreciation of the past are pitted against each other. One part is constantly trying to salvage their past and what they had together: “What about the glass dandelion, what about the TV screen”, etc., he desperately pleads. He asks how the couple can divide the objects between them, full of their shared past. But the other voice rejects it all and has already moved on, almost shouting: “You take it, I don’t need it”. “What about the undeveloped cameras?” the first person pleads again. Full of experiences not yet turned into developed memories, the experiences just sit there in the camera roll as a potential for shared storytelling for future relationships. But the other person doesn’t want it, and so all the positive memories turn into trauma: A song about rejection and how their joint narrative falls apart.

The camera becomes ripe with both potentiality and loss because it is a container for making experiences into memories. As such, it becomes imbued with meaning, representing the grief and loss of not only what was but all that might have been or was to come.

A critical aspect of this is that it is the mechanical propensities of the camera that make it agentic. It is the separate processes of taking photos and developing them that allows for as an object to express a story of all that may be lost in-between. Objects have agency and form our experiences and avenues of engagement with them through their distinct material disposition and way of interacting with time and space.

Another such example is William Odom’s The Photobox, which I first stumbled upon in Ron Wakkary’s brilliant Things We Could Design – For More Than Human-Centered Worlds. The Photo Box is an antique oak chest hiding within a photo printer connected to the internet. It randomly prints four or five photos monthly from an owner’s Flickr archive. Through its random nature, it is given a sort of semi-autonomy, making it difficult to anticipate what it will do. Wakkary points out how this unpredictability makes “the experience of the technology one of anticipation, reflection and surprise” (Wakkary p. 58).

This slow and unpredictable engagement with a person’s digital photo collection was scrutinized by Odom and his colleagues in a fourteen-month long field study, where they found that people’s attitudes changed and people took a more reflective interest in the photos taken.

By imbuing the digital photo collection with a sense of randomness and unpredictability, the Photo Box presented the digital snapshots of past experiences as gifts, creating a sense of both anticipation and reflection, thus helping turn experiences into memories and meaning.

These examples – from skeuomorphic interfaces to lyrical references to physical objects to intentionally designed artifacts like the Photobox – reveal how objects become containers for memory and meaning through their material properties. They show how the deliberate exploration of the material agency of objects can create meaningful encounters which would be difficult to make using language alone.

However, as Bruno Latour has pointed out, all objects, to various degrees, have such forms of material scripts embedded in them. What makes objects truly agentic is, therefore, not just their physical presence but how their specific materiality shapes our interactions with time, space, and memory.

The designer’s challenge, then, is not simply to shape objects to human needs, but to explore how objects and humans can form relationships of meaning together, allowing the inherent qualities of materials to create spaces for reflection, surprise, and emotional connection.

For all of us users, this perspective calls us to listen to the material script, the voice, of the objects in our lives. What forms of relations and meaning do they offer? How might they help us experience things beyond our own horizons and transcend our conditioned desire for instant gratification? Perhaps by attending more mindfully to the objects surrounding us, we might discover bridges to meaning that have always been there. We just never saw them.

Links:
Ron Wakkary’s Things We Could Design – For More Than Human-Centered Worlds
The Photobox study
Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory