IDFuel, the Industrial Design Weblog - Post details: Don't Lose Touch

Don't Lose Touch

11/10/04

Something like 85 % of your knowledge of the world comes through your eyes. So the guy who said form follows function probably had something. Obviously, formal queues are tremendously important in a user's understanding of a product and its use. But even though so much information is piping through the ol' Ojos, when it comes down to it, your fingers and hands are probably going to do the work. So don't neglect the touch.
Hand

Back in the "olden" days, when everything was done by hand, this conversation would never have come up. We would talk about how important it is to involve the sense of touch, and people would say "How the heck are you gonna do the work without touching it?". But since the 80's, computer controlled and automated devices have been the vanguard of technology. Hands were out, automatic control was in.

Because of it, you get all kinds of amazing things which operate under their own free will. Hands free faucets, for example, seem pretty convenient, until you consider the opportunities for germs to spread at major airports, causing pan-demics. Then they seem amazing. Grocery store sliding doors are also similarly aware, which comes in useful when you're loaded down with food on the way out to your bike. And with the continual cheapening of projectors and growing power of machine vision programs, incredible designs like the Messa di voce by Golan Levin , Jaap Blonk, Zach Lieberman , and Joan La Barbara will become more and more common place.

But we also have to remember how powerful even the tiniest surface information can be, or how much more control and connection we have when actually touching an object. The iPod touch wheel works in this way, and gives the user much more control and even joy out of the interface than endlessly pressing buttons or using a stylus on a touchscreen.

The Dutch design group Buro Vormkrijgers has a cool new extension of this tactile technology. Their Katana Nomadic Lamp has a pressure sensitive spine which responds to touch to move the light up or down the lamp for optimum placement. Not only does this allow the lamp to be altered, but it responds naturally to being picked up by turning on. The video of the lamp is pretty impressive.

Hands free is pretty cool, but touch is such an emotionally powerful sense, tied to comfort, sexual expression, connectedness, and even the feeling of being alive. If you can successfully connect your product's use with these feelings, the experience of your user will be richer than any automatic device could ever hope to be.

Our hands will thank you.

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Don't Lose Touch

11/10/04

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