Touchscreens have no hand

One reason I make sculpture is that I have stared long enough at the glowing flat rectangles of computer screens that show only flatland representations of real things. I like to make real things and love the physicality of making sculpture that resides in the physical world of three-space and time. The surfaces of my work often express tool marks and hand marks growing out of the handcraft of artwork production.These marks express the “hand” of the artwork and its makers. When I talk about my sculptures on artist tours I unconsciously run my hands over the surface of the work and, for smaller pieces, pick them up and hold them. These surfaces are complex, luscious, subtle, responsive, warm or cool, and three-dimensional to the touch. All that micro-physical information is made by the hand and is detected by hand and eye when the artwork is seen and touched.

There is no such hand in touchscreen computer devices. The touchscreen has no texture variation, has no physical surface information, is dead flat, reflects ambient light noise, and features oily fingerprint debris when seen at a raking angle. Also the elegant sharp edges that encase many touchscreens require users to desensitize their hands in order to ignore the physical discomfort produced by the aggressive edges. Last year in Cupertino, I yelled at some people about touchscreens that paid precise attention to finger touches from the user but not to how the device in turn touches the hands of the user (and produces divot edge-lines in the flesh).

Bret Victor has some intriguing thoughts about why touchscreens should be worthy of the human hand here.

Bret Victor’s beautiful essay is, for me, a celebration of the hand rather than about interface possibilities.

There are big engineering issues in creating even book-like tactile experiences on or near screens, since flat images require glowing hard flatland display surfaces, a requirement contrary to tactile experiences. Perhaps there will be a few small steps toward tactility. Maybe tactility will become a feature in the endless feature cycle of devices. Dimensional compression is dimensional compression, however, and even those sentient beings that reside in string-theory N space probably whine that their N – 1 dimensional display device (necessary to fit in their N – 1 dimensional pockets) fails to capture the rich experience of their real N space.

So instead let us give more time for doing physical things in the real world and less time for staring at (and touching) the glowing flat rectangle.

Plant a plant, walk the dogs, read a real book, go to the opera. Or hammer glowing hot metal in a blacksmith shop:

This video is also available on YouTube and Vimeo