Thinking about the touchscreen surface as a tactile landscape I sketched out a kind of ‘spectrum’ of possible terrains listing many types of ‘hands-on’ touch which a person might experience – ranging from ‘very gentle’ at the left thru to ‘very hard’ at the right.

The ‘Landscape of Touching’ starts at the left with ‘blowing out candles’ and ‘licking a lollypop’ and reaches it’s extreme with ‘hammering’ (via ‘stroking a cat’s chin’, ‘scratching a backside’, ‘kneading dough’ and ‘sanding wood’).  Standard ‘HCI’ type touches (‘typing on keyboard’, ‘using a Sat-Nav’ etc.) occupied the middle-ground of this scale.

I tried to list types of touch which are commonly experienced in everyday human society but I found that this criteria introduced another axis (from top to bottom) recognising that some of the touches might be more common or ‘normal’ than others.

The landscape was sketched using Prezi free software to lay out the various media and this meant that, when the file was opened using the touchscreen, many different kinds of corresponding and contrasting physical touches could be tried, making use of the software’s inbuilt drag and drop interface.

Here’s the link: ‘Landscape of Touching’ Prezi