Via Dr. Fish, this interesting short news about TU Delft that deals with the values of artifacts and how can a designer increase the degree to which people bond with them. Some excerpt:

"During her doctoral research Ruth Mugge investigated the topic of product bonding – the strength of the emotional attachment of a consumer to a specific product (...) Mugge distinguishes four factors influencing product bonding: self-expression (can I distinguish myself with a product?), group affinity (does ownership of a product connect me to a group?), memories (related to the product) and pleasure (provided by the product). (...) Mugge focused particularly on the issue of self-expression. One of her important conclusions in this regard is that consumers bond more strongly with products which have a ‘personality’ agreeing with their own personality (e.g. extrovert or introvert)

Her work also dealt with the added value of personalization (in terms of self-expresion). More about her research here. Why do I blog this? this topic is of interest in terms of design issues, the 4 factors described are important and some are more explored than others. Personalization for instance received a lot of interest, which does not mean that the others are not valuable. The "memory" part is a bit unexplored and can be thought of both extrinsically (how to provide the owner's environment with services or other artifacts that augment the memory of an object?) and intrinsically (how objects can learn from their history of interactions, to have a positive history and things explored by Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino).

Besides, it's directly connected to value profile of objects that I blogged about few weeks ago.