Just a couple of quotes from Evocative objects: Things we think with.
Sherry Turkle on objects to think with:
In Paris, I read the work of the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who described bricolage as a way of combining and recombining a closed set of materials to come up with new ideas. Material things, for Levi-Strauss, were goods-to-think-with and, following the pun in French, they were good-to-think-with as well. While in France, I realised that during my many hours with the memory closet I had done more than daydream ideas into old photographs. When I first met the notion of bricolage, it already seemed like an old friend. (Turkle, 2007, p. 5).
Objects as uncanny:
Most objects exert their holding power because of the particular moment and circumstance in which they come into the author’s life. Some however, seem intrinsically evocative – for example, those with a quality we might call uncanny. Freud said we experience as uncanny those things that are “known of old yet unfamiliar.” The uncanny is not what is most frightening and strange. It is what seems close, but “off,” distorted enough to be creepy. (Turkle, 2007, p. 8).
Rhubarb Pyjamas 