What Tod Machover loves most about his cello is its human scale. Matthew Belmonte, on the other hand, is moved by the associations his yellow raincoat has with childhood memories of maternal protection.
Robert Crease is mildly troubled by the Franklin Institute's Foucault pendulum - recollecting his failed attempts in front of it to actually see the earth's rotation that it was meant to demonstrate.
These are just three of the objects presented in more than 30 short autobiographical essays concerning charged bits of material culture that Sherry Turkle has gathered in her book, Evocative Objects: Things We Think With.
Her own inspiration for the volume began with her mother and aunt's trinkets and keepsakes. It was memories of these childhood things that encouraged her to revisit Claude Levi-Strauss's ideas about bricolage, (goods that were good-to-think-with) and to re-inject them with more emotion, turning them into "a passionate practice".
Inevitably, some work better than others, but at their best, these pithy bits of writing manage both to establish an object in the reader minds, and simultaneously illuminate some part of the writer's life and personality. Unexpected resonances with the oddest things (an archive, a rolling pin and some slime mould) make this a delightful read.
Of course, it could not be a book about things without the need to deal with classification. Chapters about objects of design and play give way to others about discipline and desire, mourning and memory.
And this need to classify her material allows Turkle to grapple with the relationship between concrete and theoretical knowledge associated with things - that is, with the distinction between thoughts that remain stubbornly attached to the objects themselves, and others that somehow come adrift.
The more abstract ideas are reinforced by contributions from weighty material culture thinkers such as anthropologist Levi-Strauss, psychologist Jean Piaget and philosopher Michel Foucault.
This provides an interesting additional layer to her project, but the core achievement of Turkle's compendium is to let loose the disparate energies of talented essayists each of whom evokes the notion of people living through as well as with objects.
Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison's much fatter book, Objectivity, is about things, or rather more about objects, and therein lies a big difference. This is a forthright argument about how objects fit into the history of objectivity.
They take "working objects of the sciences of the eye" - snowflakes, leaves, embryo models and galaxies - and show us how gradually dealing with them allowed emerging generations of professional researchers to create a "distinctive scientific self wherein knowing and knower converge".
Modern objectivity, Daston and Galison tell us, was arrived at through the careful contemplation of subjective observation. One almost imagines the museum could have been the laboratory where this thesis was tested.
Whereas the Evocative Objects writers mostly champion personal and emotional responses to things; for Daston and Galison, the human interaction with objects is instead a matter of how disciplined eyes and minds respond, and further, how those minds need also self-consciously to think that process through.
Museum objects therefore serve as bits of evidence, telling us things about the world. And by rationally prising ourselves away from things, they inform our objective sense of our place in it. But as Turkle reminds us, objects also play a vital role as things of meaning, which we delight in injecting with extraordinary playfulness.
A world "without things," Daston has suggested elsewhere, would be a world in which people "would stop talking". Turkle and her authors might wish to add that a world without things would also be one where people would stop feeling.
Ken Arnold is the head of public programmes at the Wellcome Collection
Robert Crease is mildly troubled by the Franklin Institute's Foucault pendulum - recollecting his failed attempts in front of it to actually see the earth's rotation that it was meant to demonstrate.
These are just three of the objects presented in more than 30 short autobiographical essays concerning charged bits of material culture that Sherry Turkle has gathered in her book, Evocative Objects: Things We Think With.
Her own inspiration for the volume began with her mother and aunt's trinkets and keepsakes. It was memories of these childhood things that encouraged her to revisit Claude Levi-Strauss's ideas about bricolage, (goods that were good-to-think-with) and to re-inject them with more emotion, turning them into "a passionate practice".
Inevitably, some work better than others, but at their best, these pithy bits of writing manage both to establish an object in the reader minds, and simultaneously illuminate some part of the writer's life and personality. Unexpected resonances with the oddest things (an archive, a rolling pin and some slime mould) make this a delightful read.
Of course, it could not be a book about things without the need to deal with classification. Chapters about objects of design and play give way to others about discipline and desire, mourning and memory.
And this need to classify her material allows Turkle to grapple with the relationship between concrete and theoretical knowledge associated with things - that is, with the distinction between thoughts that remain stubbornly attached to the objects themselves, and others that somehow come adrift.
The more abstract ideas are reinforced by contributions from weighty material culture thinkers such as anthropologist Levi-Strauss, psychologist Jean Piaget and philosopher Michel Foucault.
This provides an interesting additional layer to her project, but the core achievement of Turkle's compendium is to let loose the disparate energies of talented essayists each of whom evokes the notion of people living through as well as with objects.
Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison's much fatter book, Objectivity, is about things, or rather more about objects, and therein lies a big difference. This is a forthright argument about how objects fit into the history of objectivity.
They take "working objects of the sciences of the eye" - snowflakes, leaves, embryo models and galaxies - and show us how gradually dealing with them allowed emerging generations of professional researchers to create a "distinctive scientific self wherein knowing and knower converge".
Modern objectivity, Daston and Galison tell us, was arrived at through the careful contemplation of subjective observation. One almost imagines the museum could have been the laboratory where this thesis was tested.
Whereas the Evocative Objects writers mostly champion personal and emotional responses to things; for Daston and Galison, the human interaction with objects is instead a matter of how disciplined eyes and minds respond, and further, how those minds need also self-consciously to think that process through.
Museum objects therefore serve as bits of evidence, telling us things about the world. And by rationally prising ourselves away from things, they inform our objective sense of our place in it. But as Turkle reminds us, objects also play a vital role as things of meaning, which we delight in injecting with extraordinary playfulness.
A world "without things," Daston has suggested elsewhere, would be a world in which people "would stop talking". Turkle and her authors might wish to add that a world without things would also be one where people would stop feeling.
Ken Arnold is the head of public programmes at the Wellcome Collection
Evocative Objects, edited by Sherry Turkle, MIT Press, £17.95, ISBN 978-0-262-20168-1
Objectivity, edited by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Zone Books, £25.95, ISBN 978-1-890951-78-8
Objectivity, edited by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Zone Books, £25.95, ISBN 978-1-890951-78-8
