FEATURE: Designing worth---connecting preferred means to desired ends

Thingness is a consequence of physicality. Objects have boundaries, but even these are a function of context. Soak them, roast them, freeze them, squeeze them, drop them, or swing them and their forms may no longer endure. Our idealized reification of things strips away contingencies to construct “normal” encounters and usage, but every property that we attribute (e.g., color, weight, strength) is the result of interactions in context. We can sketch explicit connections by adapting techniques used in advertising and marketing, which ladder from product attributes to the happy endings of consumer values. I call the resulting connection sketch of intersecting means-ends chains a “worth map.”