This story immediately made me think of a 1981 book called The meaning of things. In this book the authors, one of which is Csikszentmihalyi, well-known for his books on the Flow experience,  describe a research project about the relationships people have with the objects around them. To my knowledge, this project has never been replicated after the publishing of this book. However, I suppose that knowledge on the relationship between individuals and the objects that surround them has only increased in importance. For example because knowledge on the value of physical objects can help us in understanding the relationship individuals can have with virtual objects, but also because of some of the major trends and developments that are going on in the world. For example co-creation. It would be hard to imagine someone co-creating something that has no value to him or her. So for understanding the concept of co-creation we also have to understand with which objects individuals have or want a relationship and why.
But there is also a development that is directly related to the relationships we as individuals have with the objects around us. Alvin Toffler has described this development as ‘transience’, meaning that the duration of our relationships with, amongst other things, objects has reduced. We are much more used to throw-away products, temporary structures and modular constructions than before. This means that our involvement with objects decreases. It would therefore be interesting to know in which objects we are still highly involved and why. Also Jeremy Rifkin’s ‘Age of Access’ in a way refers to this trend, describing how we increasingly just want access to functionality but we don’t need to possess the objects giving that functionality anymore. It would then be interesting what objects we not only still want to own as property but which objects we have even fallen in love with and why…