A psychological ownership approach to designing object attachment

By Weston L. Baxter, Marco Aurisicchio, Peter R. N. Childs. 2015

92 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The mental state in which an individual claims an object as theirs is called psychological ownership. Psychological ownership is associated with motives, routes, affordances, and outcomes directly linked to attachment. This research introduces psychological ownership in the context of designing object attachment and identifies affordance principles that help facilitate it. A framework presenting the motives for and routes to psychological ownership is proposed to provide a holistic understanding of object attachment. In the framework each route to psychological ownership, that is, control, intimate knowledge, and self-investment, has a corresponding class of affordances. Overall a total of 16 affordance principles are identified through contextual inquiry with 4 objects (a car, a mobile phone, a pair of shoes, and a park bench). Previous studies have identified various elements of this framework but have fallen short of clearly defining and relating the motives, routes, and affordances to psychological ownership identified here. These affordance principles are readily mapped to experience design models and provide a practical resource for designers. Together, the framework and the affordances inform design decisions and move towards a prescriptive design method for facilitating object attachment.

Subfields: Marketing, Social Psychology, Human-Computer Interaction

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9fa803b96eaa6b948953aa43d7353a76bcfa01e5

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In Marketing

In Social Psychology

In Human-Computer Interaction

Suzanne B. Shu

Citations in the corpus

Design for Circular Behaviour: Considering Users in a Circular Economy (2018, background): “[41] suggests access over ownership business models”
Consumption in the Circular Economy: A Literature Review (2018, background): “Other psychological theories 7 6% Theory of psychological ownership, personal construct psychology [75,122,154,161]”
Evolution of Consumption: A Psychological Ownership Framework (2020, background): “…also lead consumers to feel greater ownership for the services and intermediary devices they use to consume digital goods, such as platforms and smartphones (Fritze et al. 2020), as those touch points will be the primary means by which consumers control experiential goods (Baxter et al. 2015).”