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Consider Don Norman's emotional design - his shift in emphasis from human factors and smooth functional relationships with things, to a much broader view of design that incorporates emotional and cultural relationships with things.

The importance of narrative to design - how things and our relationships with them take us into narrative - stories of us and them. This narrative component is fundamental to how we see ourselves and connects the "real" world of things with histories of us and them, and with future projects, aspirations and dreams.

The growing importance of customization - making things that relate in specific ways to individual interests, needs and aspirations.

This also connects with localization - making things that are specific to a region, place, and time.

More abstractly involved if the matter of alienation - the condition of being radically separated from those things that you have made or which make you who you are. A concept originally developed by Marx after Hegel to understand our relationships with goods in modernity.