Touch, See, Make: Employing Active Touch in Computational Making

Abstract

In architectural education and practice, we don’t come in physical contact with what we make until the later stages of the design process. This vision-oriented approach to design is something deeply rooted in architectural practice: from Alberti’s window to the screens of our computers, design has traditionally been more of a visual and less of a hands-on process. The vision of the presented study is that if we want to understand the way we make in order to improve tools for computational design and making, we need to understand how our ability to make things is enhanced by both our visual and tactile mechanisms. Bringing the notion of active touch from psychology into the design studio, I design and execute a series of experiments investigating how seeing, touching, or seeing and touching exhibit different sensory competencies, and how these competencies are expressed through the process of making. The subjects of the experiment are asked to tactilely, visually, or tactilely and visually observe a three-dimensional object, create descriptions of its composition, and to remake it based on their experience of it using plastic materials. After the execution of the experiment, I analyze twenty-one reproductions of the original object; I point to ways in which touch can detect scale and proportions more accurately than vision, while vision can detect spatial components more efficiently than touch; I then propose ways in which this series of experiments can lead to the creation of new design and making tools.