Hello. My name is Anne Galloway and I’m very pleased to introduce myself as the newest member of the Touch research project team. Some of you may know me from my blog purselipsquarejaw, or my involvement in the spaceandculture journal weblog, but for those who don’t - I’m a social researcher working at the intersections of technology, space and culture.
Where I’m coming from
When Timo and I first started talking about the project, I was working through some ideas about the relationship between design and social science, and more specifically, about how social and cultural research could serve as materials for design. When I was offered the opportunity to put some of this thinking into practice, I simply couldn’t refuse!
As it so happened, I had also recently finished reading Constance Classen’s wonderful edited volume, The Book of Touch. Unique in its approach, it begins a cultural history of touch, and starts to draw out our cross-cultural experiences of touch. Of special interest to me was her claim that a cultural understanding of touch was probably best served not by detached or objective intellectual analysis, but rather by a “rough and ready approach that acknowledges and grapples with the tangled, bumpy and sticky nature of the topic.”
I was taught, and I now teach students, that it’s always a good idea to start any research project with a literature review. Not only does this help the researcher better understand the field in which they seek to intervene, and locate them within that field, but it helps identify strengths and weaknesses, or gaps in the existing research that can provide points of entry to further understanding.
But how could I turn the rather stodgy academic lit review into something “rough and ready” for other researchers and designers to work with? Well, one possibility was compiling a cultural encyclopædia of touch, and so my first contribution to the project will be the Touchpædia.
What’s the Touchpædia?
First of all, it’s being created as a rich and fundamental design resource for the project team. And since we’re all committed to open research, the Touchpædia will ultimately take the form of a wiki-based, publically accessible and modifiable resource. (After all, when is an encyclopaedia ever done?)
The content of the Touchpædia will be organised thematically - along the lines of “touch as contamination” and “touch as pleasure” or “touch as magic” and “touch as pain” etc. - and each entry will include the following:
1) a summary of current social and cultural research;2) suggestions for further reading;
2) possible research questions, focussed on design and material culture;
3) possible ethnographic research methodologies, focussing on participatory, performative and playful engagement;
4) simple design briefs.
We plan to have Touchpædia Version 1.0 online first thing in the new year - but that’s not all of it. Timo and I are currently working out the details on some exploratory cross-cultural probes, interviews and observations in Norway and Canada, and a variety of international and collaborative workshops.
In other words, there’s lots more good stuff to come before summer 2007 and we’re excited!
And last, but certainly not least, we’re really looking forward to hearing people’s thoughts and sharing our experiences along the way. Cheers.