This is a write-up of a talk submission I put together for Inspire Conference to be held in Leiden, Holland in November of this year (2011). Unfortunately, it wasn’t selected as one of the final few.
I’ve been interested in psychology as a whole since 2006, but I wanted to further both my knowledge and interest by looking more deeply and on a higher level. Psychology in Web Design has been talked about quite a bit for the last few years and it’s probably now got to the point where if you can’t show knowledge of it within your design work, you’re less likely to get hired.
But things are changing. iPhones started the touch revolution in 2007 and since then we’ve had numerous other touch phones as well as tablets like the iPad.
I wanted to get deeper into why touch was the next stage in the technological revolution, where it stems from and what we could expect in the future.
Thomas Ogden, the well known psychoanalyst and author, conceptualized a train of thought that healthy individuals oscillate between three distinct modes of experience: depressive, paranoid-schizoid, and autistic-contiguous, and being caught in any one of the first 2 states for too long is unhealthy. Most people, most of the time, would fall into the autistic-contiguous state. Esther Bick, in 1968, described a notion called internal object relational theory, where she says that early touch sensation between baby and mother are key moments where response to the texture of the mothers skin are conceived (excuse the pun). Here, in a healthy relationship, the baby forms the notion that the skins texture and softness equals love, kindness (and food!). These touch sensations help us to move between the three modes of experience smoothly at an early age. Touch and textures help us transition emotional states.
Lisa DeBenedittis, an associate Dean at The New School for Design, wrote a paper entitled Context, Continuity and Texture in the Designed Environment: Bridging Psychoanalysis and Design which builds upon Ogden and Blick’s theories, citing not just touch, but also that our other senses are able to move us from one state to another.
She states:
“It’s been generally understood that the modern West has been designed to be seen, rather than tasted, touched, smelled or heard. Yet designers are increasingly attending to fully embodied, sensory experiences in the environments they are creating. Brand strategists in particular, are paying significant attention to utilizing full sensory capacities when developing seamless consumer environments”
For traditional design vocations (artists, interior designers, fabric designers etc) this is quite an easy thing to understand and put in practice. A lot of their work is tactile. They need to know which texture and touch sensation produces which emotion, mainly to sell their product. But for the digital designer, there doesn’t seem to be a need to worry as any touch is on done on a screen. Whether it be a smartphone, tablet, touchscreen tv, the interface that users employ is a flat, glossy piece of glass. There is no texture.
Well, that is true, for now (and here comes the really exciting bit…)
Engineers at a number of electronics manufacturers are in the process of creating what I call ‘reactive’ touch screens. They are able to interpret the design on the screen into electronic pulses, sent to the finger(s) of the user. This means that your trendy, noisy background will now feel like sand to a user. Great if your designing a site for a building contractor or sand distributer. Take a look at the video below:
I can see huge potential in this technology for blind or partially blind people. They won’t now just have the choice to use a screen reader, but the possibility is there to use Braille on a website. I would love to see an option in browsers to translate a site into Braille in addition to the zoom in/out functionality we have at the moment.
This has great potential. As web designers, we need to be aware that this technology is evolving and may soon be mainstream. We need to be aware of how important texture is in creating emotional response, not just for selling purposes, but to be responsible to our audience.
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