Our Second Self

So apparently designers are starting to think like planners.

Our relationship to electronic devices has changed so radically in the last few years that designers are beginning to think about our attachments to and, yes, love of electronics like smartphones and tablets. More devices are personal. They have become an extension of ourselves — not in the sense that an expensive watch says something about whom we want to be, but as an actual part of our conscious self.

“It is different now that we carry our second self with us,” says Sherry Turkle, an M.I.T. professor of social studies of science and technology who has long studied the subject of what she calls evocative objects. “We think with the objects we love and we love the objects we think with.”