Meaning.

You can’t go far wrong with a Dieter Rams quote can you:

“Good Design is making something intelligible and memorable, great design is making something memorable and meaningful.”

Making something intelligible is to make sound decisions in the design process, something is memorable when it is a good design and easy to remember for making a clear statement; it becomes an icon.

But making something meaningful is better still. The meaning of something is derived from how it fits into a context, a culture, and point in time and history. A product with meaning might communicate a value like authenticity or playfulness, or remind us of something else, or the time when… 

An example would be making a kettle out of copper, most people will have come across the old copper pots so straight away they’d be thinking of quality, homeliness, social hubbub in a way that wouldn’t be prompted by a plastic kettle.

Meaning depends on culture, on context and history, so we need to understand that stuff. People are inevitably engaged with their surroundings so it depends on their baggage, where they’re coming from, their lives, their journey, and habitat.

People generally respond to meaning by intuition, which is informed by experience, so someone’s understanding of meaning will depend on them and their subjective view. Intuition deals in emotion which is a very powerful motivator and compass, in a sense we can’t avoid meaning.