For the past few weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of working with a talented team of students during a tactile design workshop I have been facilitating as part of my research fellowship at Archeworks design school. I’m sorry to see the workshop conclude as the students were wonderfully creative and their input has proven invaluable for the future of the project. So I’ve invited them as guest bloggers to share their experiences with you. Our first reports about the class are authored by Megan Gallagher & Will Cwik:
Will writes: The tactile design workshop began with two classes aimed at opening ourselves to new ways of experiencing the world and to understanding the role that touch plays. During the first exercise, we were blind-folded. We were asked to feel and describe objects to each other that we had not seen before. I found it difficult to understand the object from the descriptions of shape and texture from other students. Being able to hold the object for myself made it clearer to me what it was. From a reading we has called Eyes of the Skin by Juhani Pallasmaa I learned that a society centered on the visual sense is a relatively recent occurrence and that the other senses played the dominant role throughout history. Using this knowledge, we created one tactile graphic based on a recipe from a historical southern food cook book and one based on an interview discussing food history. The tactile graphic made for the interview was critiqued by a focus group of people with low and no vision. While there were sometimes contradictory opinions on our pieces, for example if the picture of the food should be textured or not, an important point was made that there can never be too much detail.
“…you can never have too much detail to something, but you can have too little.”
Rich Schultz, focus group participant
Megan elaborates on this lesson about detail: Upon completion of the 6 week tactile design workshop for Archeworks, we had the opportunity to show our projects, which were a culmination of discussion and exploration in tactile graphics and food stories for a group of 6 people who had low to no vision. The projects were tactile illustrations of stories told by people with a relationship with soul food, whether that was a cook or a group of people who grew up eating it. The process of creating an illustration from a specific idea was not a new one for me. The process of taking a two dimensional idea and bringing it into a three dimensional realm was also not new for me. The process of creating an illustration that would to communicate as art without the use of sight seemed part of a world very foreign to me and a concept difficult for my mind to wrap around. Our critics’ feedback was invaluable.
The variety of projects presented appealed to the variety of tastes of those experiencing them – images and colors for those who had low vision, braille for those with no vision and scents to all. It was in our discussion that I found my connection to this project and these special people. Our guest Richard’s description of his experience with art provided this for me. He came to the table born with no vision and described his preference to draw in plan and elevation, as drawing perspective and vignettes is a very difficult thing for him. Being in a design community that uses orthographic projection to communicate, I instantly related to ease that comes with understanding something, whether that is an apple, a teddy bear or the facade of a building, through the two dimensional representation of it. As a designer, I take the idea in my head and translate it on paper through plan, section and elevation. It is through these drawings, adding detail or subtracting it and working relationships of different elements, that the idea comes to fruition. I can only speculate that for a person with no visual relation to the world that the touch of an object beings to create these working drawings in their mind.
Richard also mentioned for him that you can never have too much detail too something, but you can have too little. It makes me think that this detail he speaks of is what brings an object from a concept of what it might be to a determination of what it actually is.