Digit Culture
A Fingerbook for Our Times
MA in Design Curating & Writing at Design Academy Eindhoven
Ana
Lisa
Nadine
Alperovich Botha
Megan Elisabeth Dinius Anna-Mea Ray Anja Carla
Hoffmann Hu Neidhardt Zimmermann
It was designed by Yorit Kluitman, to whom we are very grateful for entering into the spirit of the project, con brio.
Beckon, Be touched by, Brush, Burn one’s fingers, Butter fingers
This booklet was researched, written, and edited by the students of the MA in Design Curating & Writing at Design Academy Eindhoven, 2015-2016
‘The human being in the future without things will exist by means of his fingertips’. Vilém Flusser
Imagining a course for aspiring design writers and curators, it seemed crucial that it should address the transition from a material culture to an increasingly immaterial one. The Czech-born media critic and philosopher Vilém Flusser was instrumental in how that course – the MA in Design Curating and Writing at Design Academy Eindhoven – turned out. His two essays on ‘the non-thing’ offered a framework for how one might start to understand the shift from objects to screens. And one central tenet of that shift is the idea that we have moved from a culture of the hand to one in which power resides in the finger.
This booklet, fuelled by curiosity, scepticism, and a tight deadline, is our modest offering on that theme. It assembles new insights and observations, as well as excerpts of historical and contemporary material that in composite offer a way of reading new forms of tactility in a digital age, considering in particular the feedback loop between body, brain, and screen via the fingertips. In the Digital Age, it stands to reason that the digit – the finger – is king. As Flusser pointed out, fingertips have long been the organs of decision, whether we were taking pictures, changing channels, or contemplating the nuclear button.
Can be counted on the fingers of one hand, Caress, Catch, Conduct, Dab, Digiterati, Dip
Intro
But we have moved beyond buttons to a world of seamless surfaces navigated entirely by our fingertips – beyond mere pressing to a ballet of arcane micro-gestures, a language of touch. This booklet accompanies ‘Touch Base’, an exhibition about tactility at the Salone del Mobile Milan 2016. The resurgence of tactility – in books and products, for example – is one obvious reaction to digital culture, a longing for the real, for texture, friction and meanings that can be grasped by the hand. The desire for a haptic response is not mere nostalgia, it is also an attempt to distinguish that which is physical from that which is best left in the dynamic, ungraspable space behind the screen.
However, to segregate the cold, smooth surfaces of our digital devices from the realm of the tactile is not quite accurate. Touchscreens, obviously, rely on touch – on the electrical charge in our fingertips. We access the networked world by tapping, swiping and pinching. Those in the know use ‘five-fingered grabs’, ‘four-fingered claws’, and ‘three-fingered uppercuts’. And haptic engineering reminds us how screens are learning to touch us back, to tap into more of the finger’s 3,000 nerve endings. As yet there is none of the sensory reward of wool, clay, or velvet, but the finger is the key to the information age. —Justin McGuirk and Alice Twemlow, Co-Heads, MA in Design Curating and Writing at the Design Academy Eindhoven
Direct, Draw
‘The soul of objects is a transacted thing, like the life that we attribute to puppets or animated drawings; but the soul of the subjects is the result of just the same kind of transaction. The soul is, as Michel Serres has suggested, not on the inside but out on the edge, at the fingers’ ends, between I and it’. —Steven Connor, ‘Taking Pity on Things’
Touchscreen Typologies
Surface Capacitance: The most basic capacitive touchscreen consists of a glass substrate coated with conductive material, charged at each of the four corners to generate a uniform electrostatic field. The screen detects when fingertip disrupts the field (imagine the classic two-dimensional representation of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity), but it cannot register more than one contact point. Resistive Touchscreens: In resistive touchscreens, a flexible surface actually responds to the physical press, in which the two infinitesimally separated layers come into contact, detecting a kind of ‘dead spot’. Commonly seen in ATMs, credit card scanners, and older in-flight entertainment systems, these screens offer the advantage of reading non-capacitive stimuli (gloved fingers, styluses, etc.) but cannot detect multiple points and are generally being phased out due to improvements in capacitive screens.
Frustrated Total Internal Reflection: It is also possible to detect touch through machine vision. As in fiber-optic cables, a sheet of glass or acrylic will also ‘totally’ refract infrared light projected onto the material, such that those wavelengths will only escape the medium at points of contact. In Frustrated Total Internal Reflection, the IR camera underneath detects one or more fingertips on the back- or edge-lit screen. This technique is granular enough to read fingerprints, but the optical process demands greater overall volume. As in rear-projection televisions, the camera distance is proportional to the size of the screen. Capacitive Fingerprinting: Even as HCI expands toward haptic and speech-based interfaces, the touchscreen still has untapped potential. A team of computer scientists from Disney Research, CMU, and the University of Tokyo are developing a capacitive screen that can detect touches from multiple different users. Dubbed ‘capacitive fingerprinting’, their work explores ‘how the electrical properties of users’ bodies’ — bone densities, muscle mass, etc. — can be used to identify and differentiate multiple users touching a screen.
On the Mundane Magic of Multi-touch By Ray Hu
Feel, Fiddle, Finger-pointing
Touchy or Feely?
On the surface, the space-age glass of the touchscreen and the human epidermis are tactile opposites, each everything the other is not. The former is hard, cold, clear, absolutely smooth, and yet brittle for its crystalline structure; the latter is soft, warm, opaque, and visibly lined with the wrinkles and pores of personal topography. More and more the twain shall meet as multitouch technology marks the paragon of digital prestidigitation. As the fingertip and touchscreen inexorably become codependent, it makes just as much sense to measure the sensitivity of a screen as it does to refer to the capacitance, or electric potential, of a fingertip.
the pixel-packed LCD display and a sturdy pane of glass lies a pair of invisible substrates, conductively pinstriped and orthogonally oriented to form a dense X-Y grid. When one or more fingers disrupt this electrostatic field, the firmware identifies a touch, tap, swipe, or pinch with the high precision and nearinstantaneous speed that we take for granted today; each gesture can be reduced to an algebraic formula on the Cartesian coordinate plane.
Nevertheless, this advanced technology is nothing compared to the sheer complexity of human skin. The outermost protective layers, or epidermis, are primarily composed of The latest capacitive keratin — a protein that screen consists of a high- forms the continuous tech sandwich: Between surface of the largest
power. Somatosensory signals may reach the thalamus in a matter of milliseconds, but it can take upwards of ten times as long for the brain to process them; the iPad 2 — the fastest touchscreen on the market today — clocks in at a blazing nine milliseconds, effectively instantaneous to both hand and eye.
Despite all this, we still hesitate to describe our For comparison, the grid fingertips as electronic, density of the iPhone has and to conceive of a doubled from 25 points screen as capable of per centimetre to 50, feeling. The screen in tandem with screen abides as the interface resolution, between of the moment, yet 2008 and 2012. But these the metaphysical sensors are only part distance between skin of the equation when and glass remains the it comes to the latency, insurmountable barrier or response time, of to consummating the the capacitive screen bionic circuit of man and or the nerve impulse, machine. and here computers can compensate with superior processing
Finger bowl, Fingerbreadth, Finger food, Finger footsies, Finger hat
organ of one’s body — under which lies immune cells, melanin (pigment), and of course the relevant receptors for pressure, temperature, vibration, and pain. With over 3,000 of these nerve endings, the fingertip is easily one of the most sensitive parts of the body — the other being the lips — while the rest of the body averages around 200 per square centimetre.
*
* Schematic of a basic capacitive touchscreen
GLASS
CONDUCTIVE LAYER 1
CONDUCTIVE LAYER 2
LCD DISPLAY
How a multi-touch capacitive screen works
Impactless fingers By Carla Zimmermann
Fingerpost
Are your fingers impotent when it comes to your touchscreen companion?
try using a piece of cold sausage
Try as you might to poke or rub your device, its silky surface simply won’t respond to your alien digit? You might just have the condition known as zombie fingers, or, less exotically, a callus on the finger. Calluses, or layers of dead skin, reduce the conductivity needed for the connection between your fingertip and the device. If you are adventurous you might want to try and use a piece of cold sausage to support the transmission. Otherwise why not get a magic wand, a.k.a. the capacitive stylus, to replace your unusable tips and facilitate your Candy Crush addiction.
Graphic symbols used in technical production drawings to indicate surface finishes and roughness values.
Fingerprint, Finger root
Portrait of Charles Barbier (1767-1841), creator of night writing.
WR ITI N G
A N D
TH E
AWL
The Strange Origins of Braille in Napoleon’s Army
By Ana Lisa Alperovich
Fingertip, Fingerwave
N I G HT
A few years later, in the small northern French town of Coupvray, a young boy called Louis Braille was playing in his father’s leather workshop punching holes into a piece of leather with an awl. As he bent down to examine his work, the
awl slipped into one of his eyes. The other eye became infected and rendered him completely blind.
Line art illustration of an awl by M Bogdan. Source: MarySRosaries.com
Napoleon Bonaparte needed a way for his front-line soldiers to communicate silently and in complete darkness at night, to avoid being seen or heard by the British troops. In 1808 his Capitaine d’ Artillerie, Charles Barbier, developed a code he called night writing. Barbier’s code consisted of a system of raised dots grouped in cells, each of which represented a character or phoneme. The cells were two dots wide and six dots tall, impressed into pieces of card using an awl.
Meanwhile, Napoleon’s soldiers had found Barbier’s tactile code difficult to read and the system had been dismissed as impractical.
other civilian uses for his technique, including teaching the illiterate to read and write. But he was soon to realise that it was the blind that could
for Blind Youth in Paris. Sitting in the front row of the classroom and listening carefully was 12-year-old student Louis Braille.
Flip the bird, Fondle
benefit the most from embossed writing. In 1821 Barbier was invited to demonstrate night writing to students at the National Institute
Example of night writing made on a piece of card using an awl. Source: Wellcomelibrary.org
Undeterred, Barbier self-published a series of pamphlets, of which Petite Typographie PrivÊe d’Ambulance is one, where he suggested
Charles Barbier’s self-published pamphlet Petite Typographie Privée d’Ambulance [N1] (1815), which includes other uses for night writing like teaching the illiterate, note-taking and creating multiple copies of the same document. Source: Wellcomelibrary.org
Give the finger, Grab Night writing alphabet created by Charles Barbier in 1808.
Braille is the most widely used writing system for the blind. Portrait of Louis Braille (1809-1852) creator of Braille. Painting by Lucienne Filipi.
In the following years Braille would simplify and refine Barbier’s system from 12 to six dot-cells to speed up the process of reading via one’s fingertip. In 1837 Braille published his improved code under his surname. In 1854 the system was officially adopted in French schools and, to this date,
‘When Laura is walking with her hands spread b instantly every one she them with a sign of reco girl of her own age, and favorites, there is instan recognition, an intertwin of hands, and a swift tel tiny fingers whose rapid thoughts and feelings fr mind to those of the oth
— Constance Classen (e
through a passageway, before her, she knows meets, and passes ognition; but if it be a especially if one of her ntly a bright smile of ning of arms, a grasping legraphing upon the d evolutions convey the rom the outposts of one her’.
ed.), The Book of Touch
TouchReading
By Ana Lisa Alperovich
Therefore a blind person reading Braille uses both the tactile and visual area of the brain.
People often think that Braille is a language in itself, but in fact there is a Braille code for every language, as well as codes for mathematics and music. When we slide our fingertips across the embossed Braille dots, receptors under our skin, called Merkel cells, produce electrical impulses that race through the nervous system and up towards the brain.
However, in reading Braille, the brain must not only perceive the shapes of the characters, but once it has done so it must turn them into language, using another part of the brain, the temporal lobe, above the ear.
This pattern of electrical stimuli activates the brain’s parietal lobe, the tactile area, which helps us decode shapes and textures.
The three areas of the brain involved when reading Braille not only enhance tactile sensitivity, but also are the same ones used by a sighted person reading print.
For blind people, especially ones blind from birth, touch also activates the occipital lobe, in charge of vision.
Haptic, Have a finger in the pie
Braille is a tactile writing system used by the visually impaired, and traditionally created by embossing dots on paper.
‘What is significant is the way a new language of haptic sensations and simulations is being articulated within marketing and engineering, so that these forces and sensory properties are mimicked, modelled, experimented with, and the collocation of the different forces and sensations is altered and combined in new ways. The admixture of sensory properties by haptic hardware and software opens up a discussion of the right “feel” of a virtual object, and has genuine impact on future design and the crafting of actual objects’.
—Constance Classen (ed.), The Book of Touch
By Carla Zimmermann
Counteracting Evenness Electrostatic Vibration-enabled tablet by Disney Research Centre, 2010. Source: Disneyresearch.com
Tablet by Blitab, 2010. Source: Independent.co.uk
Haptic Technologies in the 21st Century
The smooth surfaces of our touchscreen interfaces are pervasive. As German philosopher Byung-Chul Han recently told Die Zeit, what characterises our present time the most is ‘evenness’. As an example he referenced the G Flex smartphone from LG, which has a self-repairing coating. Any scratches dissolve. Han considers this selfhealing, smooth ‘skin’ as a symbol of our moment. The world around us is turning into a polished and even surface with no room for irregularities.
is focused on haptics. Some mobile devices already include vibration feedback to acknowledge any touch, but there is more to come. Engineers are researching how to imbue the silky surfaces with graspable threedimensionality in three main areas: 1) force feedback devices for computer controllers and mice; 2) haptic displays to simulate shape and texture threedimensionally; and 3) devices that exert tactile pressure on the skin of the body through gloves or full body suits.
And yet as the WabiSabi philosophy — with its aesthetic celebration of imperfection — reminds us, we tend to like irregularity in our objects. In reaction to the over-evenness of our screen-saturated world, the latest research in touchscreen technology
Haptic research finds applications in diverse areas. The American military, for instance, has introduced a haptic belt, which guides soldiers through the battlefield with the help of vibrations, and warns the user of impending attack. The medical field
But it is visually impaired people who are set to benefit most from haptics. Through this technology, the blind will be better able to access information via touchscreens, those sleek surfaces that had hitherto been the exclusive domain of the sighted.
The Electrostatic Vibration tactile touchscreen developed by the Disney Research Centre is one manifestation of this technology. The device can constitute the physical borders of an object through frictional forces transmitted to the fingertips through electrostatic vibration. This allows blind people to feel threedimensional surfaces. Since 2010 the research project has aimed to develop the prototype into a product. Besides the goal to enhance tactile experience for non-sighted people, the Centre also plans on implementing the technique into computer games for general use. In addition to enhancing tactile experiences for the blind, haptic innovation is also focused on developing
Have the world at one’s fingertips
is interested in haptic engineering because of the healing effect of tactile stimuli for those suffering from diseases like dementia or Alzheimer’s. In dentistry too, a stylus with haptic feedback is employed to enable dentists to virtually distinguish between a healthy and an infected tooth and to transmit the tactile experience into the real procedure. And the pornography industry is starting to explore haptic feedback to enhance virtual realities.
new types of braille. A Kindle-like refreshable braille reader, created by researchers at the University of Michigan, demonstrates how the translation of text into braille is advancing. Compared to common braille readers — which only translate one line of text at a time and are very expensive — the Blitab, as it is called, allows a full page to be translated. What makes the reader affordable is the fact that it does not rely on expensive electronics, but uses a relatively simple pneumatic structure, which pushes up pins with either air or fluid, transforming the interface to a grid system of braille letters. In addition to solely translating text, the Blitab tablet also shows how graphic information like maps, graphs and
pictures can be rendered in braille. With maps, for instance, the grid of pins interprets the outlines of the geographic information into touchable contours. Even if these devices are still somewhat blunt instruments in haptic terms, they nevertheless offer visually impaired people unprecedented access to our digital surroundings. Perhaps such efforts will spill over into regular commercial practice and our everyday interactions, and help counteract the relentless evenness of our surroundings.
Hitchhike, Hold ‘Bad Kingdom’ EP cover illustrated by Siriusmo for Moderat collaboration with Pfadfinderei, 2013
Index finger, In touch
Searching Google for ‘Finger Condoms’ By Ray Hu
Scan quality notwithstanding, Google Books has resolved its copyright issues since its launch in 2004, with 25 million titles scanned as of October 2015 (the 100 million or so to go will take several decades at least). In the meantime, artists have aestheticised the glitch: Noting that many of the manual labourers are people of colour, Andrew Norman Wilson’s 2012 project ‘ScanOps’ presents the scanned hands alongside investigative reporting on everything from Google’s hierarchical employee badge colours to trivia such as the fact that ‘mass market books can be sliced open and fed into scanners, but books from library collections need to be photographed from above’. All-seeing though its eye may be, Google still needs helping hands to turn the pages of the books.
Jab, Keep one’s fingers crossed
Design writer Phil Patton likened it to the urban legend about ‘finding a finger in one’s bowl of fast-food chili’, but the phenomenon, in this case, is unsettling precisely because the digits are not detached. Rather, the scanned hands belong to the lowly data-entry workers at Google, who process books page by page for the tech giant’s Borgesian digitisation project. The scanners’ invisible handiwork occasionally turns up on the page: digitally embalmed hands resembling grotesque analogs of pressed flowers. Their fingers, clad in purposeful prophylactics that help them to grip the pages, are radically, disturbingly, decontextualised.
Politics and Physiology By Nadine Botha
Behind tactile perception lies an entire sensory system, which encapsulates not only the skin but also the bodily awareness of organs. At least four sensory modalities form the basis of tactile perception: proprioception, the sense of relative position of the body; mechanoreception, the sense of physical pressure or distortion; thermoception, the sense of hot or cold; and nociception, the sense of potential harm through pain. These sensory modalities are complemented, amplified, and averred by the four other senses. Cultural theorist Anne
Cranny-Francis argues that tactile perception has long been considered an inferior sense because it is embedded in the body, and because Descartes’s mind-body dualism was so influential in Western ideology’s dismissal of tactile information or intelligence. Yet, we cannot not-touch, as it is the default interface between ourselves and the world, making it the most social of senses. As such, Cranny-Francis proposes four accultured meanings in her biopolitics of touch: connection, engagement, differentiation, and positioning between individual and the world of people, species, objects and phenomena. All that privilege at our fingertips!
Unflattening perception: Not your typical graphic novel, Unflattening (2015) by Nick Sousanis is more of a visual philosophical treatise against the pervasiveness of language-based thought. He argues that verbal intelligence is linear, whereas compared to visual or other sensory brainpower that is rhizomatic. Like the 19th-century novella Flatlands, which describes how 2D shapes cannot conceive of a 3D world, Sousanis proposes that we are flattening our consciousness by desensitising ourselves. Source: Harvard University Press.
Mindfulness and Prayer Bead Apps By Anja Neidhardt Traditional prayer beads in a shop. Source: Inmutualweirdness.com
Let slip through one’s fingers
Digital Spiritualism
The idea of meditation and praying is to connect to the god(s) you believe in (if you believe), but also to yourself. Repetitive bodily movements and prayer beads can serve to focus, concentrate, and find this illusive spiritual bond. Though Yoga, Tai Chi and other exercises, are often practised to relieve stress and find inner peace, these and other meditation
aids have their origin in religions. For many believers they are still embedded in their daily devotions. Hindus, Buddhists, Catholics, Muslims, and Sikhs all use beads to mark the repetitions of prayers or chants. The small pearls, one per devotion, guide them until they feel the completion of one set, marked by a bead that distinguishes itself from the others through its surface or shape.
Traditional prayer beads. Source: Imphoreal.com
Buddhist pilgrim praying beads at Jokhang Temple in Lhasa, Tibet, 2010. Source: Cleverson Sefrim, journals.worldnomads.com
Focused, slow, continuous movements, involving the whole body. Eyes closed. Beads strung on a ribbon running rhythmically through fingers, one by one by one.
programs that aim to calm over-stimulated smartphone users and help them regain their focus — with the help of their devices, of course. But is it possible to bring such physical practices into a digital environment? Can spiritual tactility evolve towards new forms? What can we gain, and what do we risk losing?
pre-set Islamic praises, comes with sound and vibration feedback as well. But instead of imitating reality, the
Make contact, Manipulate, Meddle with
The Rudraksh Japa Mala app by Electroid Inc. enables its Buddhist, Hindu, and Sikh users to touch and swipe digital beads animated on the screen, but the practitioners mostly value a haptic response: ‘A vibration on every swipe lets you know that your mantra was counted even if you’re not watching the screen’, says Joy Vernon in a 2014 blog post on her website. The app iSubha, which offers several
Catholic prayer beads draped over a rearview mirror, 2012. Source: Brandon Vogt, Ignitumtoday.com
Nichiren Shoshu Buddhist prayer beads. Source: Nstmyosenji.org
Now it seems as if intimate, embodied, spiritual experiences, like everything else, are being absorbed by the smartphone. App developers are creating
Rudraksh Japa Mala app by Electroid Inc, 2014. Source: Play.google.com.
developers, Guided Ways Technologies, base the visual design of their app on a mix of Arabic ornaments and forms
in mindfulness apps such as Pause. The app sums up in statistics how many sessions you have completed and the time you spent doing them. If Pause reminds you of computer games, you are right: its designers, Ustwo, also developed the game Monument Valley in 2014.
However, with its new app, Ustwo aims to isolate one aspect of the total philosophy of Tai Chi — mindfulness — and bring it into the digital sphere, literally. With one finger you follow a graphic reminiscent of a bubble in water, which appears in randomly that reference, rather displayed gradients than resemble, prayer on your touchscreen. beads. iSubha also keeps You can do the slow, a full history of counts continuous exercise, and session times. This supplemented by layer of quantified self sound and guiding through gamification is text that blends in and not only present in prayer out, for one minute or bead programs, but also until your phone runs
body’s ‘rest and digest’ response in order to help the user to regain focus and release stress. Surely, though, a single finger tracing a twodimensional graphic on a sleek surface is a
Not lift a finger, Only a swipe away, Out of touch
poor replacement for the embodied experience of meditation. And the vibration response of a smartphone seems like an ersatz recreation of the tactile, sensual variety of physical, three-dimensional beads running through fingers. One wonders if it is really worth trading in a spiritual connection to the supernatural spheres, channelled through our body and mind, for the sense of ‘connectedness’ promised by our new technological gods.
iSubha Islamic Prayer Beads app by Guided Ways Innovations Ltd, 2015. Source: iTunes.apple.com.
Pause app by Ustwo studio and Peng Cheng (PauseAble), 2015. Source: Ustwo.com
out of battery. On its website, Ustwo calls this interaction with the screen an ‘exchange’, and says that it triggers the
Pat, Paw, Pick, Pinch, Pinkie, Pointer, Press
By Anna-Mea Hoffmann
Are smartphones altering the physiology of our hands? Recent research suggests that the thumbs of today’s young adults are appreciably stronger and more dextrous than the rest of their fingers. The phenomenon of teenagers being more likely to text than to call has inspired the notion of the ‘thumb tribe’.
As a result of this constant thumb typing, a digital native is more likely to ring a doorbell with their thumb than their index finger. Whilst the phenomenon of a deformed and diminished ‘smartphone pinkie’ has shocked the Japanese media, we might soon find ourselves with outsized super thumbs.
Prestidigitation, Put one’s finger on, Riffle
On Thumb Tribes and Digital Natives
The Fiddle Factor
Casual Stimming, from Cigarettes to Mobile Phones By Megan Elisabeth Dinius
We all do it. When bored, anxious, unfocussed or even just thinking, our fingers reach out for different forms of tactile stimuli. Typically associated with the behavioural tics of people in the autistic spectrum, ‘selfstimulatory behaviour’, known as stimming, is actually a natural impulse embedded in most human beings. These unconscious sensory compulsions that live in us include pen-clicking or rubbing a small item such as a cigarette lighter in one’s pocket. However, when so many of our possessions are now held within a single ubiquitous digital device, what is the potential for physical distraction? Even though our digital devices come with ‘touch screens’ and
associated gestures namely the invisible pinch, the hardware itself is anything but physically stimulating, the build becoming sleeker and increasingly more minimal. The smooth glass and metal encompassing these aerodynamic bodies of technology are not the most tactile of materials and very few details encourage us to play with them, forcing the user to invent his own stimming rituals. In the pre-digital era, it was the smokers who revelled in discreet fiddling. Before the habit of smoking was banished solely to the great outdoors, smokers would enjoy a panoply of small casual twiddles. Fiddling with lighters was a whole genre: flipping a Zippo open and closed, or fingering the ovoid body of a Bic lighter, rubbing
the knurled wheel with our digits. Other common tics included twirling the small tobacco batonettes between one’s fingers and thumbing the edge of the lid on the cigarette packet (which once empty offered a whole new range of fiddling possibilities). With cigarettes now in social exile, it is our mobile devices that have taken up the demanding role of being our new anxietyrelievers. We are all digital smokers. Our phones have effectively replaced the cigarette, the pen and keychain. No more twiddling, flicking or jangling — just gliding. As we now settle nerves and kill time on our screens, the only marks of our social angst are the greasy fingerprints we leave behind on them. Leaving us little to fiddle with, the
modern phone has few physical distractions — if any at all. Before the bland skeletons of our smartphones came into being, some older models brought some relief — the slider phone would go nervously in and out, while the flip phone could be compulsively opened and shut — and rhythm to our quotidian interactions. The notion of ‘fiddle factor’ was coined in Leander Kahney’s biography of Apple’s Jonathan Ive. The haptic intention first became apparent in Ive’s design for the Lindy MessagePad, where he integrated a springloaded retractable stylus and a snapback lid, with its nostalgia for a journalist’s notepad. This need for physical and tactile details on hightech appliances is aimed to not only reassure but
Pat, Paw, Pick, Pinch, Pinkie, Pointer, Press
‘He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore’. —Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria
to make the product more relatable towards the user, reminding us of its semantics. Similarly, Japanese designer Naoto Fukasawa recalls the early pleasures of peeling a potato, and holding its faceted body in his hands. His tactile fascination with the blunt edges of the spud prompted him to use this element in the design of his W11K mobile phone — its polygonal body offering fiddleable reassurance in the pocket of its owner.
have caught on to our need for a good fiddle, inundating the market with a plethora of covers and accessories to dress our digital friends. Some wear a leather sleeve or perforated silicone cover, while others preferring the wilder attire of a Lego-inspired protection — to give their devices fascinating new tactile landscapes for our fumbling fingers to explore.
As they lie on the table, our encased screens bear the patina of our nervous touch, their corners creased and their Current day devices backs polished by our leaving little to our tactile sweaty palms. Flicking imaginations, have and fiddling away our forced us to find solace everyday stresses, in the smallest of details, fulfilling our primal need such as the tiny edge for tactile distraction. surrounding the home button or the ‘mute’ switch on the side. As a result, many third-party manufacturers seem to
If these standard ‘visual’ textures from the Adobe Creative Suite make your fingers tingle, that would be synaesthesia. This describes the phenomenon of a sense (here touch) being affected indirectly by another (visual).
Slide, Snatch, Somatic, Squeeze, Stroke
Sound of Finger and Mind By Ray Hu
Richard Hunter Harris, United States Patent #4,118,611, 'Buckling Spring torsional snap actuator', 1978
A Brief History of the Keyboard Click
One can only wonder what the Czech thinker would say about today’s 140-character attention
span, apropos thumbs gliding across the same QWERTY schema, abbreviated to the size of a small Post-It note. The uncanniness of this bee dance is only compounded by the de-spatialised, wooden cluck of each keystroke. More like the click of a tongue than that of a key, the audible feedback is a shadow of a skeuomorph: Buried deep in the iOS subconscious, the audio file is tellingly known as ‘tock.aiff’, implying that it is in fact half of a metronomic binary, digitally decoupled from source and cadence alike to spite Flusser’s conceit of ‘correct intervals’. The sound of thought has been reduced to an afterthought; silenced by most users, ‘Keyboard Clicks’ simply cannot compete with the algorithmic reassurance of autocorrect.
Swipe, Swish, Tactic, Tangible, Tap, Thumbelina
‘Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts’, mused Nietzsche, referring to his Hansen Writing Ball, an early typewriter dating back to the 1860s. A century later, philosopher Vilém Flusser also considered the typewriter a part of his thinking process. ‘He rejected electric and electronic typewriters because he objected to the noises they made,’ relates architecture critic Martin Pawley. ‘Flusser [preferred] manual over automatic machines, claiming that the silence between keystrokes coupled with the physical act of returning the carriage left to right, left to right, punctuated his thoughts at the correct intervals for composition’.
There were, of course, intermediate steps between the philosopher’s fetish and the silence of the keys. Introduced in 1984 — well within the final decade of Flusser’s life — the IBM Model M is coveted to this day as the nonpareil of computer keyboards. Based on 50 years of expertise in mechanical typewriters, Big Blue’s patented ‘Buckling Spring torsional snap actuator’ is calibrated to ~60g of tension, the sweet spot of buttonpushability, such that a decisive stroke of each perfectly weighted key is synchronised with its click. Even in the inferior ‘rubber dome’ keyboards of the 1990s, the depth of ‘key travel’ yielded a telltale sound, like raptor claws on linoleum (not to mention the graveyard of crumbs in the interstitial
crevices). The minimastaba has since been flattened into a Scrabble tile, the scissor hinge of its itty-bitty innards like a cross between a director’s chair and the belly of a beetle. Indeed, the insect scuttle of the latest computer keyboards is but a vestige of the bygone tap-dance of typing. So too do we increasingly twiddle at a metaphysically flattened keyboard, sealed under glass, its disembodied ‘click’ a rather more dubious act of preservation. In an onomatopoeic 2013 op-ed in the New York Times, typewriter enthusiast and actor Tom Hanks echoed the aphoristic musings of Nietzsche and Flusser; The following year, he apotheosized his avocation with the Hanx Writer, developed by
typewriter as a chattering nexus of natural language and computer code, an audible threshold between analog and digital. ‘Only since we have calculated have we had machines (typewriters, for example), and we could not live without If the IBM Model M machines, even if we represents the evotried’, Flusser declared. lutionary link between ‘We are therefore forced the typewriter of yore to calculate rather than and the keyboard of to write, and if we insist today, Flusser presciently on writing, then we have identified the former to go “click”’. with a more fundamental shift. Taking sound to be Now, as the saying goes, the hallmark of a legible there’s an app for that. machine interface, he sees (and hears) the
Tickle, Tom Thumb, Touch, Touchable, Touch base
Hitcents. Listed in the ‘Productivity’ category of the App Store (where it briefly topped the charts on launch), it is more or less what one might expect from a typewriter app: old-timey keyboard skins paired with rickety sound effects.
10-Key Calculator for IDEA Japan by Industrial Facility, 2008.
‘The breath, prayers, and libido of the fingertip must somehow be transferred to the neutral indifference of the key’. —Russell Sherman, Piano Pieces
Kereel ‘Your Daddy’ Blumenkrants, winner of the Air Guitar World Championships, 2015
Ges m Air G ture u i t a R Tech ecog rs to nolo nitio n gy By Anna-Mea Hoffmann
Touch upon, Touch wood, Touchy, TouchĂŠ
g n i t c u d n o C n r e d o M the d l r o W Fro
Friday, 28th August 2015: It’s rock show time in the small Finnish town of Oulu. The rapt crowd cheers when Kereel ‘Your Daddy’ Blumenkrants bounds onto the stage in skin-tight finery, convincing as a 1980s metalhead. The music begins with a blast of distortion, giving way to a blistering solo, and the gawky Russian struts and shimmies without missing a note. But has he left his guitar in the dressing room? No, it’s the Air Guitar World Championships. Playing fresh air with meticulous dexterity, his ecstatic pantomime is pure catharsis and his body transforms into the instrument, itself becoming literally and figuratively immaterial. Electric soap dispensers, virtual keyboards, 3D Minecraft, and in-car controls: gesture-based
interaction is not a new technology. However, its scope is expanding, with numerous phones and tablets offering inbuilt airgesture modes. A camera, supplemented by bodymapping algorithms, reads and interprets human gestures and instantaneously translates them into digital information. This form of touchless touch might soon supersede conventional input devices such as mice, keyboards and touchscreens. Having already moved from the physical button to the digital interface, we are now touching the impalpable space above the screen. Making contact with physical devices is no longer necessary when we can use the world around us as digital interface, orchestrating its response by flailing in thin air.
Film still from Minority Report, 2002
Volkswagen Golf R Touch with gesture control system, 2015
Toy with, Trace, Turn, Untouchable
Drawings by Charles Aweida, 2015. Source: cka.co Film still from Creative Control, 2015. Source: Washingtonpost.com
For example, the 2015 Volkswagen Golf R Touch cockpit is furnished with three touchscreen interfaces and integrated proximity sensors. The system responds to a vocabulary of gestures, similar to that of a conductor, allowing for the precise manipulation of the car’s controls while reducing driver distractions. These include swiping the sunroof open, to raising the radio volume with the horizontal drag of a finger, folding in the side mirrors with an upward swipe and switching off the lights with a downward stroke. Builtin three-dimensional cameras detect each movement and translate it into a mechanical command. Most of the gestures in interactive technology originate in real-life interactions, mirrored
into digital imperatives. Whether humancomputer interaction can really be systematised and how universal that system can be across brand IP, will determine a future in which a machine can differentiate between deliberate and accidental gestures without causing a firestorm of unwanted operations à la Jacques Tati. In order to decode commands many sensors require slowed-down and exaggerated gestures, often resulting in rather awkward-looking and ungraceful manoeuvres. After all, when the object is removed from the equation, the artificiality and infantilism of a ‘shake to erase’ or ‘turn to open’ may surprise when performed in public. The simple gesture of swiping, like the intuitive gesture of turning a page, has given birth to many digital subcategories such as
even her own mother, trying to make her disappear like an image on a touch screen’. What happens when our actions become the intangible gestures of a single all-powerful finger waving in the air? As the English romantic poet John Keats said ‘touch has a memory’. Without real and distinct contact anymore, the lingering effect of memory will change. Trapped in a symphony of empty gestures we might soon forget the music we are really playing.
Touch down, Touched, Touch on, Touch up
the refresh swipe, edge swipe, or even corner swipe. After extended legal procedures Apple successfully patented the ‘swipe to unlock’ feature in 2010 and what used to be an intuitive action is now a monetised proprietary language. While many gestures have been transcribed from physically interacting with objects, technology has evoked a gestural language that is more and more abstracted and alienated from the actual tactile experience. Our nonchalant swiping, from left to right, now dictates our love life or professional communications — approving or dismissing, erasing or keeping. Allison T McCann, a journalist for ScienceLine, relates a story about a toddler who swipes everything – ‘the coffee table, books, plates and
Super Fingers? Manipulating our fingers’ sense of touch is at least as old as thimbles and gloves. Thimbles protect our precious tips from pain and puncture. Gloves not only shield fingers from the chill and damp, but also moderate the sensation of objects and textures. With these low-fi prosthetics, the functionality of the hand and fingers is protracted, which German performance artist Rebecca Horn took to its literal extrapolation in her ‘Finger Gloves’, made in 1972 as part of her series of body extensions. Alternately, technology can transform fingers into superheroes. For instance, the Happaratus power glove, by Royal College of Art graduate Morten Grønning Nielsen, gives fingers the resistance necessary to carve hard materials like wood and stone. Basement body hackers are also pioneering magnet implants into the ring fingertip in order to augment the sensation of otherwise imperceptible electromagnetic fields and ferrous content of metals. None of these appendages make it any easier to use a touchscreen. In fact, sewing conductive thread into glove tips might be the only way of even communicating with one. By Nadine Botha
Magnetic fingertips can lift small objects. Source: Wired.co.uk, Themedicalbag.com, Howstuffworks.com
Happaratus power glove by Morten Grønning Nielsen, 2015. Source: Happaratus.com
‘Finger Gloves’ by Rebecca Horn, 1972. Source: Harvard Art Museum
Tactile Illusions
5
Ways to Trick your Fingertips
1. Aristotle Illusion: With index and middle fingers crossed, touch tip of nose to feel two noses. The Greek philosopher originally used a pea. 2. Reverse Illusion: Touching the inside corner, of for instance a room, with index and middle fingers crossed will feel like one surface not two. 3. Temperature Illusion: Put one hand in cold water and the other in hot water. After a few minutes, place both in lukewarm water. The hand coming from the cold water will find the lukewarm water hot, and the hand coming from the hot water will find it cold.
4. Weight Illusion: Lifting a brick in a small box will make it feel heavier than if it is lifted in a large box. 5. Comb Illusion: With index finger touching the top of a comb, run a pencil back and forth along the side of the teeth. The finger will be duped into feeling a raised dot moving along the comb, rather than the real sideto-side movement of the prongs.
Wrap around one’s little finger
Dexmo haptic exoskeleton by Dexta Robotics, 2015. Source: dextarobotics.com
Simulated Stimulation
Virtual Tactility By Nadine Botha
Seeing has never really been believing. Since well before the first bioscope, our sense of vision has been taunted with shadows and illusions, which were initially translated into animation and photography, and have now become manifest in virtual and augmented reality. Yet, when our eyes lie to us, we’ve always had our sense of touch to separate the chimera from the chaff. Sensation on skin is our most trusted means for establishing the bounds between physical and virtual reality. Now, new technology points to a future in which tactility itself becomes an illusion, a tool of the simulation. In the past year, at least two startups — UltraHaptics and Elliptic Labs — have announced prototypes that use ultrasound haptics to
create a sensation on users’ skin by inducing radiation pressure in force spots. The smallest diameter of the force spots stands at 8.5mm, determining the resolution of the experience, for now. Paired with hologram or VR visuals, however, the most immediate application is replacing physical controls with ondemand light switches, car dashboards, home entertainment systems, and even alarm clocks. Besides resolution, ultrasound’s potential is also limited by the fact that it only works on bare skin and really only allows for the sensation of gentle stroking. It cannot achieve the firm pressure nor the sense of weight that would be needed for a virtual handshake. Robot hands such as Hiro III and Dexmo, and gloves such
as Hands Omni and Glove One, point to a future where the physicality of human affection and even object-handling will be transmitted virtually through mechanical and electromagnetic force. Tesla is also parading haptic body suits. Transferring muscle-memory learning between expert and student hands, such as those of surgeons and artisans, is just one potential use. Closest to market of these virtual touch technologies is the Unlimited Hand, an armband that electromagnetically maps the wearer’s skin to stimulate tactile sensations that match with the contours of virtual objects. Funded on Kickstarter and due for delivery in autumn 2016, Unlimited Hand presages a whole new genre of the
wearables category, in which the device does not merely monitor our body, but in effect controls it. These wearables include Thync, which may or may not stimulate your brainwaves to create energised or peaceful moods, depending if you believe Buzzfeed, PC World or MIT Technology Review. As highlighted by the conversations around Thync, the device is leapfrogging traditional medical and consumer testing procedures in a technological adoption pattern that it is no longer top-down. How such technology may design our bodies and their interface with the physical and virtual worlds opens a sticky mess of questions about the philosophy of mind-body, whether our personal experiences are actually private and unique, and whether
l’Artisan Électronique virtual pottery studio by Unfold and Tim Knapen, 2010. Source: Unfold.be
Unlimited Hand ultrasound-enabled wearable, 2016. Source: UnlimitedHand.com
our perceptions of our bodies can be changed — from standard selfimage questions around eating disorders to speculative notions of phantom limbs. These are not questions we might ever be able to comprehensively answer, even once, especially once, the technology becomes prevalent. To quote the David Foster Wallace joke, ‘fish don’t know they’re in water’.
available in certain smartphones). Yes, this technology might well make traditional designers feel insecure in the face of a future where they are finally forced to rely on coding and algorithms, rather than creating and imagination.
Design has been clinging to craft as the saviour of the physical world, the last holdout against the digital engineers. Yet virtual touch fits with the What challenges virtual urban and environmental touch poses to our shift from thing to noworld of things, and the thing: smaller and dedesigners responsible cluttered living spaces, for making those things, reduced production and is a more tangible waste, and ultimate question. When product, mobility and nomadism. contextual, and industrial A less pessimistic design are no longer perspective for designers concrete, the workshop is also expressed in with its CNC-mills, angle l’Artisan Électronique. grinders, and sewing Designed by Unfold machines will be replaced and Tim Knapen, it is a by as little as a laptop, an virtual pottery-throwing armband, and perhaps environment that a 3D scanner (already 3D-prints the result.
be relegated to the museum as a quaint artefact. And what of the real? Ancient history, if one is to believe French philosopher Jean Baudrillard who cancelled it out with his notion of hyperreality in the early 1980s, a conception in which ‘the museum, instead of being circumscribed in a geometrical location, is now everywhere, like a dimension of life itself’. As with Wallace’s fish, we don’t know we’re in hyperreality.
Dexmo haptic exoskeleton by Dexta Robotics, 2015. Source: Youtube.com
The Manchester Museum is leading the charge in using haptics to engage visually impaired users, but why stop at disability design? For design museums, this technology may compromise the significance of physical locality and even the aura of the object but, on the other hand, instead of only being able to see the untouchable Gerrit Rietveld chair, for example, it could place it right in visitors’ hands. Milan Design Week could become a physical simulation accessible anywhere in the world, while real tactility would
‘I worry tha the world g fingertips, t it gets from —Jonathan The New
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The MA in Design Curating & Writing at Design Academy Eindhoven How do we read spaces, objects, and systems, and what do they say about our culture and society? The MA in Design Curating & Writing at Design Academy Eindhoven provides the critical skills necessary to reflect on the numerous roles design plays today, while challenging conventional perceptions of what design is. It draws on both theory and direct observation, using research and analysis to enable students to develop a personal point of view. Responding to a rapidly shifting landscape in which both media and museums are redefining themselves, the course offers students pathways and methods for refining their writing and exhibition-making practice, and for developing fluid careers that might incorporate journalism, criticism, and curating in all formats. More info: https://www.designacademy.nl/Study/Master/General/ DesignCuratingandWriting.aspx Tutors and Visiting Critics 2015-2016 Nick Aikens, curator of exhibitions, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven Nick Axel, managing editor, Volume Christiane Berndes, head of collection, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven Evelien Bracke, curator, Z33, Hasselt Tom Dyckhoff, architecture critic and broadcaster Charles Esche, director, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven Annie Fletcher, chief curator of exhibitions, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven Diane Franssen, curator and head of research, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven Agata Jaworska, curator Justin McGuirk, writer, critic, and chief curator, Design Museum London Catherine Rossi, design historian Noam Toran, artist and curator Alice Twemlow, writer, critic and curator Richard Wentworth, artist Will Wiles, novelist and architecture critic Co-Heads of Department: Justin McGuirk and Alice Twemlow Coordinator: Judith Konz
Acrobat Karl Carsony balanced on top of a champagne bottle by his finger, captured by Charles Hewitt, 1950. Source: Hutton Archives, Yelp.com