Digital products do not smell or taste, they have no different perceptible surfaces and they have no weight. So only the eyes and ears can tell something about a material value or build up a minimal sensitive relationship between the products and their owners. But is this enough? In the post-digital era, “something has weight” had been an idiom for “something has great relevance”. The weight had given our brain the confirmation of the valence. I like the German word for “appreciation” – “Wertschätzung”. It is a composition of “Wert” = “value” and “Schätzung” = “treasures”. But how do learn appreciation if always fewer things are having a sensually experienced corporeality? Is there a relation between the weakening of ties to objects and persons and the loss of weight as a scale? Knowing what an iPhone costs is different from knowing what it’s worth. If I have to do Smalltalk one of my questions is if people have favorite items. How long do they own them? Have they had to save money over a longer period before they could buy them? And how they will describe their relation to their favorite items in comparison to their other stuff. “Wertschätzung”, is a nice word – especially for me, who is producing digital content and who loves my Karmann Ghia even more for his smell, his weight, and his surfaces.

If you like the smells, the typical surfaces, and the weights of metal, glass, and leather, have a look at my leather holster, my customized Laco diver, and my USB necklace.