How many times—thinking about it personally—have you been told that? Don’t touch! Hey, don’t even think about touching that! Hand’s off—not for you! Please, just look—no touching!
Mostly, these days, I don’t ask, don’t look around for approvals, I just touch—
unless it’s a museum, gallery or antiquities shop.
Or, perhaps, a place where I’m NOT supposed to touch anything—
as in here—another person’s possessions.
Of course, what we all know is that the work that we do is a concatenation between mind, imagining, meditation and the expression that flows through our hands—it’s the touch of drawing, drafting the articulation of inspirations and ideals.
Breaking rules, and touching things—touching anything, that sensation draws us closer—and being closer, we know more—we are in contact.
Isn’t it so, for you,
that when you touch something,
you know more?
In a conversation, touching the person that you’re communicating with, adds a series of punctuations and pauses that accentuate the movement and flow of that conversation. And two, it’s an adhesive, it’s a reach between the space of people in their place, to each other.
From a nervous system response, touch tells more—the art of touching is,
as well, something of another degree of holistic sensation, and
when you’re designing for touch—as a brand shepherd, it could be imagined as a degree of reaching inside the brand, and into the mind of the experiencer. For example, a smooth touch implies
a certain coolness, perhaps a clinical character.
Add texture and the physical storytelling
becomes something different; a people see texture, but if they touch it,
it becomes personally engraved,
like the touch, drawing deeper.
What that might be, is in the touch of a book,
the feel of a counter, the warmth of a light,
the touch of a handle, the seam of a window—cool.
Think of sand and, perhaps, an incised lettered message,
and what that message, so-framed, could mean as you touch it, read it, contemplate its meaning?
And in all the sensations of texturality, what of the touch of a person?
The more you touch,
the more you know.
Touch is a confirmation;
with firmness, with form.
Tactility, seeing with the eyes of the hand.
And then the soul knows.
As a designer, to brand,
that is where you live.
You design for sensation, which frames as moments of: the touching, the sight seen, the scent whiffed, the taste savored—and what is heard. These too find further sensate experience in the eight sensations:
Balance, Intuition, and Memory.
I think of elder wood:
I contemplate the touch of cleaved metal and rust.
Palm down, gliding on liquid glass—smooth and waffled.
Slide the hand and feel the movement of a sinuous concrete.
Run your fingertips on a blasted and brushed steel.
Percolate puncture.
See, then touch, the scene of blast-engraved glass.
The crackling grasp of a crunch of minerals.
The snapped measurement line of a sheet of compressed timber.
Drift your fingertips on an old industrial door of hammered steel, pocked and smooth.
Then stride on cobble and stone—footfelt.
When I drew this hand, below, with a brush, on roughened sandstone, I was thinking—“when I feel this brush, this ink drawing-out of this hand—my hand, handmade, to hand drawn—I’m thinking of the sensation of all the mechanics that created this rendering—the sound of the brush—it’s sanded song, the scraping sound of the stone on wood, and while drawing comes out the muscled memory, the scent of the ink—and holding the stone steady.
As designers, as strategists, [we should] think sensationally—
this brand, its touch—“what is that?”
TIM | GIRVIN | Seattle waterfront
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