Sentimental Attachment to Objects

In this Richard Seymour keynote the speaker discusses the emotional impact that beauty and aesthetics have on an individual. The designer begins his speech by relaying a story he heard when he was a child that had a physical, emotional effect on him. Using this example, Richard Seymour talks about how aesthetic visual or auditory stimulus tend to bypass what we think and goes straight towards how we feel.

Using an example of a child’s drawing, Seymour asks the audience "how does this picture make you feel?" The response towards the picture immediately changed once the audience discovered it was the last thing that a five-year cancer patient was able to complete.

The emotional functionality of an object is something that affects people in an individual and intimate way; it bypasses cognitive interpretation and has an emotional significance that cannot be mimicked.