The exhibition Belongings: affection as a design strategy explores how our emotional relationships with objects can be key to more sustainable consumption. Based on the idea that we take better care of what we are emotionally attached to, the exhibition presents design as more than form and function – as relationships that can extend an object’s lifespan and create meaning in everyday life.

Relationships between people and things

The exhibition unfolds as a sensory total installation, inviting visitors to bring a personal object and enter into a dialogue with it. Through AI technology, the object is given a voice and a character, and the encounter between human and object takes shape as a form of therapy or conversation. Alongside talks, workshops, and a digital archive, the exhibition creates an open space for reflection on our relationship with things—and on how care and emotional attachment can shape the design culture of the future.

The life of things after the encounter

The digital archive is a central part of Belongings: affection as a design strategy and functions as the exhibition’s collective memory. Here, the personal stories that emerge from visitors’ encounters with their objects are gathered and made accessible as a living, growing archive of relationships between people and things.